90 Years of Orient Express

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A 38-year-old English woman sits on a bench at the Gare de l’Est train station in Paris, on her first solo trip abroad. It’s a providential time for an escape. Her marriage has collapsed. She has survived a suicide attempt. She has embarrassed herself in front of the entire country (although only she knows exactly how, and why). She has found some success as a writer, but it’s far from clear that she’ll be able to recapture that early magic. She needs inspiration! Something new. Smoke drifts across the platform. A whistle pierces the air. It’s time to board the train. With hands trembling from excitement and trepidation, Agatha Christie steps onto the Orient Express…

The most famous mystery novel of all time, Murder on the Orient Express, was published on New Year’s Day, 1934. In America, it was published as Murder on the Calais Coach, to avoid confusion with Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train, which had been published in the U.S. as Orient Express. It’s instructive to compare these two books.

Both Christie and Greene instinctively grasped the dramatic possibilities of rail travel: suspense, romance, and the taut desperation of passengers trapped in an intimate, not say claustrophobic, environment. Greene adopts a conventional approach for what he might have later called an “entertainment”: a motley group of characters, all with their own secrets and fears, find their fates intertwined on a train that is, a favorable critic might say, “hurtling towards a rousing climax.”

Christie is up to something different, and more sophisticated.

Two fundamental facts define travel by rail: the train is always in motion and the passengers are all strangers. Christie subverts both. First, she slams the brakes by famously stranding her Orient Express on the tracks in the snowbound Alps, instantly plunging the novel into a variant of the Locked Room puzzle (what TV screenwriters now call a “Bottle Episode”). And then she cleverly invents a premise — medium spoiler alert! — in which none of the passengers are strangers.

Christie had already upended the mystery genre eight years earlier with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which the killer is revealed to be the one character who is typically not allowed to be the murderer. Now she was doing it again. The typical mystery is focused on one singular question: Which of these suspects is the murderer? Christie’s innovation in Orient Express was to contrive a solution — major spoiler alert! — in which everyone is the murderer.

To revolutionize a genre once is astonishing, but to do it twice? Now you’re just showing off. And Christie wasn’t done. In her best novel, 1939’s And Then There Were None, she came tantalizingly close to devising a mystery in which no one is the murderer. (I’m one of those cantankerous fans who pretend this book’s explanatory epilogue simply doesn’t exist.)

We know what came next for Christie: fame, fortune, films, TV, her self-transformation from gifted storyteller to one-woman industry reliably churning out books year after year (“A Christie for Christmas” as the marketers would say). To her millions of fans living now around the world, all of this success appears as well-plotted and foreordained as one of her books. But of course, Christie knew nothing of what lay ahead.

Let’s return to our imagined little scene at that train station in Paris. Christie’s divorce had been finalized just a few months earlier. She is, at this point, probably as famous for her mysterious 11-day disappearance as for her books. (She was found in a hotel, checked in under the name of her then-husband’s mistress.) We know, but she does not, that on the hot dusty plains near Baghdad, Christie will soon meet a dashing archaeologist — nearly 14 years younger! — with whom she will live, happily, for the rest of her life. We want her to succeed. We’re rooting for her. Inside the dining car, the novelist’s eyes study her fellow passengers. They betray themselves with every word and glance. A small smile flashes across her face as she thinks to herself: If you had to murder someone on a train, how would you do it?

A woman fails at suicide. She buys a rail ticket to an exotic destination. She recalls, vaguely, reading newspaper articles about a famous kidnapping in America. Of such raw stuff is life — and literature — made.

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