Hook, Line, Sinker: Agatha Christie and Le Train a Grande Perfidie

I had been on a major Agatha Christie kick lately - which is actually a late-in-life discovery for me, having been hooked by the televised versions of the Miss Marple series. (And yes, I am aware that the recent versions were not faithful to Dame Christie's version - though I'll admit that I will still take them over last Sunday's desecration of E. M. Forster.) While I'm up here, I'll also say that I have not always had the chance to watch David Suchet's portrayal of Hercule Poirot on TV. I did, however - geek alert! - download and waste hours of my time on the computer-game versions of Death on the Nile and Peril at End House. Yes, the games do bear the signature of Dame Christie by way of a nifty licensing agreement - though not necessarily faithful to the plots of the books themselves (see the Wikipedia entries for both books if you want more spoiling) - and the game play is superb.

That said, I plowed through the first two Hercule Poirot books from my stash - Evil Under the Sun and The Mysterious Affair at Styles - both of which turned out to be quick, addictive reads that made me lose track of time at the bus stops and office desks where I tried to sneak them in. I figured, since I was already hooked, I might as well get cracking on the third book in my stack: Murder on the Orient Express. How hard could it be, right?

Easier said than done. It took me three days to get through this whole novel, even though it was no thicker than the two other books I had just finished.

How hard is it, anyway, to get through a claustrophobic murder mystery surrounding the not-quite-cold corpse of a wealthy, obnoxious American? How hard is it to figure things out when Dame Christie's publishers were kind enough to even provide me with a diagram of everyone's accommodations? How hard could it be for anyone to figure out who the murderer is, with all these passengers on board - bound only by a common hallway on a passenger cab - and a snowdrift blocking the train's way from Istanbul to Calais?

By then I was no longer a stranger to Christie's recurring theme of treachery in close quarters - not after having played the games and watched the movies - so of course I had to find out which one of the twelve passengers was the culprit. Midway through the book, however, I was practically suspicious of everyone on board - even with all the airtight alibis and lack of access to crime-fighting resources. CSI this certainly isn't. And if you thought the mystery surrounding Le Train a Grande Perfidie (a little pun, by the way, pour les Francophones et Francophiles) was going to get tied up neatly in a pretty bow, with Hercule Poirot offering a pithy soundbite while twirling his Mustache of Justice... think again.


I had to read the last chapter of the book three times this afternoon, just to make sure I actually got everything straight - all while screaming all sorts of obscenities (in my head, of course) and wondering how in Dame Christie's own mind did she able to manage to wrap such a dark mystery in so much skull-duggery without making the whole thing sound so depressing. Any other writer would've come close to putting the same elements together, and still would never have come up with something so intricately structured and engineered.

In Hercule Poirot's own words: "The whole thing was a very cleverly planned jigsaw puzzle, so arranged that every fresh piece of knowledge that came to light made the solution of the whole more difficult."

And it took me another re-read to realize that this was more than just another story about a dead American on a train; it was, after all, the story of the world at large in the early 20th century, where globalization in commerce also brought about the globalization of scandal and treachery. (Ian McEwan, are you taking notes?) True, the Americans in this story are nowhere near heroic - though the Europeans don't fare any better, either - and Christie even manages to sneak in a "ripped-from-the-headlines" allusion to the Lindbergh kidnapping case to drive home her point... but that's just a small fraction of the bigger picture - as M. Bouc, the train-company executive who helps Poirot solve the mystery, gives us a clue at the very beginning:

"...All around us are people, of all classes, of all nationalities, of all ages. For three days these people, these strangers to one another, are brought together. They sleep and eat under one roof, they cannot get away from each other. At the end of three days they part, they go their separate ways, never perhaps to see each other again."

But are these passengers really strangers to each other - trains passing in the night, so to speak? Can they truly get away from each other, in the light of such grand tragedy? And what does this case have to do with those other places in that particular point in history, where people of all classes, sexes, and ethnicities often found themselves with no choice but to co-exist with one another while living with their own consciences? (Let me put it this way: If it were truly up to me, Barack Obama should be reading this book right now.)


To say anything more about the book at this point would be to ruin the grand mystery behind such perfidy; I can't even tell you whether or not the solution to the mystery actually leads to the resolution of the crime. What I can tell you for sure, though, is that Murder on the Orient Express could not be any more relevant now than it was in the 1930s, and it will definitely make you wonder how much of what we now know as history has been foreshadowed by the undisputed Queen of Mysteries in this singular, treacherous train ride. You won't be sorry.