Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie [93]
The confidence trick Mrs Christie plays on her readers this time is even more dazzling than the one in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The plot must by now be well known, especially since the very successful 1974 film of the novel; but Christie fans tend to play fair and not reveal dénouements to the uninitiated, and so future generations will probably still be able to enjoy pitting their wits against the cunning authoress. It gives little away to reveal that Mrs Christie clearly was inspired to write Murder on the Orient Express not only by the romantic image of the train which had intrigued her for years before she travelled on it for the first time but also by the tragic Lindbergh kidnapping. (The American aviator Charles Lindbergh had made the first solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927. In March 1932, his infant son was kidnapped and killed.) The startling solution to the problem posed by Murder on the Orient Express was first suggested to Agatha Christie by…Max Mallowan.
The famous American crime novelist Raymond Chandler was known to have despised Agatha Christie’s solution to the Orient Express mystery, but he was one of a very small minority. Oddly, Agatha Christie revealed the ending by referring to it in a Poirot novel, Cards on the Table, two years later. All that will be said here of the solution is that, though perhaps improbable, it does explain an earlier improbability in the story.
Poirot, in fact, propounds two theories, one of which is more likely than the other, and allows M. Bouc of the Wagon Lit company to choose between them. The question of whether to allow the criminal to escape is raised, and it becomes clear that Poirot is, under certain circumtances, not averse to allowing someone to take the law into his own hands, if justice cannot be achieved by legal means. Mrs Christie appears to condone this, not only in Murder on the Orient Express but also, a quarter of a century later, in a play, The Unexpected Guest. In other words, not only did she not disapprove of capital punishment, she was also willing, under certain circumtances, for that punishment to be inflicted by agencies outside the legal system.
The murder mystery is usually at its best when a group of people are isolated from the world at large, on an ocean liner, in a snow-bound country house or, as in this instance, on a train. The train has a fascination of its own, especially the glamorous international train, and none more so than the Orient Express, which is now only a memory, though a London-Venice rail service, calling itself Venice Simplon-Orient Express Ltd and using four of the old Pullman carriages, recommenced in 1982.19
Agatha Christie’s murder mystery is not first novel of adventure to have been set on the famous train. La Madonne des Sleepings by Maurice Dekobra (1925) had appeared in an English translation in 1927 as The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, and Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train was published in 1932, two years before Agatha Christie’s novel. It is curious that Green’s title was changed for American publication to Orient Express, since Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express was published in America as Murder in the Calais Coach. Could it have been that the Christie title was changed in order to avoid confusion in the United States with Graham Greene’s novel?
On its first publication, Murder on the Orient Express was widely and favourably reviewed.