After I finished Murder on the Orient Express, I vibrated with excitement. I had some distaste for it at first, but then my disinclination was forgotten. The story follows Hercule Poirot, a brilliant, eccentric detective, who finds himself on a train with a dozen or so other passengers when a murder occurs. When the train is stopped unexpectedly, it falls to Hercule to interrogate the passengers and determine the murderer. As Hercule, M. Bouc, and Dr. Constantine uncover the evidence little by little, the reader slowly pieces together a story alongside them. At the end of the novel, the detective explains what happened with an ingenious plot twist, knocking the reader off their feet. Murder on The Orient Express dazzled me… for about two minutes. The ending felt spectacular, but as the rush faded, I was left thinking about the rest of the book. It was… boring. 

The first two-thirds of the novel is a menial gathering of evidence with occasional absurd theories sprinkled throughout. Occasionally, authors can get away with bland plotting by including clever dialogue or description. Take, for instance, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Although the plot moves very slowly, the vivid descriptions and rich (albeit sparse) dialogue give the reader something of value to take in while reading; they give a deeper sense of the awful gloom of the world, and character development that couldn’t be expressed in any other way. Christie seldom uses any descriptors, probably as a way of trying to contribute to the mysterious atmosphere, but doing this doesn’t really fulfill its purpose— it works so much more to keep the reader from being fully drawn in. The dialogue doesn’t help either. Whenever any of the suspects speak, it sounds repetitive and unrealistic. Whenever Poirot is questioning someone, it feels as though he is merely questioning the same person, just in a slightly different way. For example, when they talk about the victim, Ratchett’s murder, Hurcule asks nearly identical questions, and the passengers’ responses feel as though it is merely being checked off a list. ‘Well, no one has responded in this way yet, so I’ll use that!’ This lack of realism certainly can be attributed to the fact that all the suspects are playing characters, but that doesn’t give the reader any solace while reading. Murder on the Orient Express has zero character development. Poirot is opaque to the reader due to his constant manipulation. His companions, M. Bouc and Dr. Constantine, are quite simple. The only interesting bit of character we get is from Constantine when he thinks, “‘I wonder what Zia is doing at this moment. If my wife ever finds out—” and when the narration mentions Constantine “recalling his thoughts from certain pornographic details.” Even this, though, is not valuable, since the background comes at the end of the book, where the reader is engaged anyway. Because of the short time scale and the advanced age of many of the passengers, no growth is made, and although this may be usual for a detective book, the absence of growth certainly doesn’t help the entertainment factor. It may be tempting to explain away these issues by suggesting that that isn’t where a mystery book’s enjoyment comes from; it comes from the challenge of discovering the solution alongside the detective. Unfortunately, the book falls short in this aspect too. Although the book is constantly presenting evidence to the reader, there is no way the reader could piece the evidence together with any certainty. Sure, there is a chance they could hazard a wild guess, but their chances of getting it right are effectively random. This is amplified by the fact that we don’t even get all the information that Poirot gets. For example, up until the end of the book, we have no clue that the lock in one Mrs. Hubbards room couldn’t possibly have been hidden like she suggested, because its placement is entirely unknown to us, leaving us out of a rather important bit of information. The mystery feels akin to the famous riddle-joke. You’re stuck in a room with no doors or windows. In the room is a table and a mirror. How do you escape? The answer, of course, is you look in the mirror, see what you saw, and use the saw to cut the table in half. Two halves make a whole, so you put the hole on the wall and climb through. You likely know the answer, but there’s no possible way to figure it out without knowing the solution first. There are plenty of absurd solutions you could come up with, but only that one is the correct way. In the same way, you couldn’t possibly guess the ending of the book, which defeats the idea that this is where the value of the book is found.

Admittedly I’ve kind of been ragging on the book thus far, but looking at Agatha Christie’s success, she clearly isn’t stupid. You don’t become “the most widely published author of all time, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare.” by producing stories that can’t sell. Her books must have some redeeming qualities. Yes, of course, that is the case. As I already mentioned, Murder on the Orient Express’s ending is wondrous, a true joyous shock to the reader. Everything feels wrapped up so perfectly, chaos tied together by a nice little bow. After that, how could someone possibly say they hated the book? The reader is like a hiker after climbing a mountain— they’ll always say that the difficult labor was worth it because the view at the end trumps all else. Perhaps this is because they want to justify their pain— maybe they just remember the end best because that’s what they remember the best. Either way, they’ll probably suggest it to a friend, and who puts down a book after just barely picking it up? Thus we see that Agatha Christie’s genius makes the book do miles better than one would expect from her writing.

Do I recommend this book to the average reader? I can’t say that I do. If you get more joy from looking at the book retrospectively than in the present, then it is an incredible read. Otherwise, I’d look elsewhere for an entertaining book, one that doesn’t rely so heavily on one part of the book to support all the rest of it.