“The murderer is with us –on the train now…” (57).
Written while on a dig at Arpachiyah, Nineveh in 1933, Dame Agatha Christie crafted her magnificent masterpiece Murder on the Orient Express which prominently features the world’s most wondrous train –the Orient Express– the intercontinental luxury railway which had captured Christie’s imagination from a young age. She was first given the chance to ride the Orient Express in 1928, and only a few months later, the train garnered headlines when it was suddenly trapped for six days in a notorious blizzard, stranding all of its passengers. Years later in 1931, Christie herself became trapped aboard the Orient Express when sections of the railroad were washed out in a fierce rainstorm, preventing her from returning home after leaving her husband’s archaeological dig site in Nineveh. It was this incident that eventually inspired the characters in Murder on the Orient Express (as indicated in a letter she wrote to her husband), but the novel’s chief antagonist was actually inspired by the famous Lindbergh baby kidnapping and subsequent murder in 1932. The utterly shocking twist ending to this top-caliber mystery was first suggested by Christie’s husband, Max Mallowan, to whom the novel is dedicated. However, despite many contemporary critics ranking Murder on the Orient Express as among the absolute best of the Hercule Poirot series, some critics and writers, like Raymond Chandler, infamously despised the ending. In my own view, Murder on the Orient Express is one of Christie’s finest achievements –a brilliantly constructed novel filled with humor and intrigue aboard one of the grandest European rails as all the clues are carefully laid out before our eyes, but as with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in the end we are blindsided by the outrageous, improbable solution.
Murder on the Orient Express begins in the middle of winter on a train platform in Aleppo, Syria. Freezing cold, our favorite little egg-shaped, high-minded Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, is headed to Istanbul (or “Stamboul”) aboard the Taurus Express as a tourist (he has never visited Constantinople before). The scene is frigid and quiet since very few people are traveling at this time of year, and the train can sometimes become snowed in. Poirot has recently solved an important case on behalf of the French government before heading to Turkey. Aboard the Taurus Express, he encounters a strange couple who are anxious to get aboard the Simplon Orient Express.
After arriving at his Turkish hotel, the Tokatlian (following a boat crossing over the Bosphorous), Poirot receives a telegram beckoning him urgently to return to Kassner Castle in London, and so he must secure a last-minute sleeper on the Simplon Orient Express to make the three-day journey across Europe. Surprisingly, when he arrives the Orient Express is at full capacity. Luckily Poirot happens upon an old friend from his legendary time working with the Belgian police, M. Bouc, a director of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon Lits. Bouc helps Poirot take over a sleeper berth in Istanbul-Calais coach in the place of an Englishman named “M. Harris” who curiously never showed up for the train departure.
As the train approaches Belgrade, Poirot starts to notice suspicious behavior among the passengers on this oddly full train car. He meets a man named Samuel Ratchett who carries an automatic gun and walks with an apparent air of malevolence about him. Ratchett approaches Poirot and asks for his help since he fears for his life, but Poirot flatly refuses claiming he only accepts cases that deeply intrigue him (Poirot is not persuaded by money and he doesn’t like Ratchett’s face).
That night, Poirot awakens to strange noises coming from the train car –a groan and a frantic bell ringing– at the same time, the train has come to a standstill, snowed in somewhere between Vinkovci and Brod, Yugoslavia (or present-day northeastern Croatia).
In the morning, Poirot learns that Ratchett has been murdered, he was stabbed about twelve times in the night. Inside Ratchett’s cabin is found an ornate handkerchief with the letter “H” inscribed on it, as well as a pipe cleaner for a tobacco pipe, a partially burnt note, and a button belonging to a train conductor. What could all of this mean? Poirot is persuaded to help with the case by his friend M. Bouc who worries that the corrupt bureaucracy of the Yugoslavian police force might lead to problems. As Poirot slowly starts to piece together this complex tapestry, he notes that he and Bouc –and another person, Doctor Constantine– are not disposed to the usual resources afforded by the police since they are stranded. Instead of piecing together clues in an old country estate, the trio are trapped in a frozen tundra aboard a luxury train, graced with only their ‘little grey cells’ and the power of deduction to solve this mystery. Notably, our beloved Captain Hastings is wholly absent in this novel. But unlike other Poirot novels that are sans Hastings, Murder on the Orient Express still features Christie’s trademark sense of humor with Poirot’s hilariously subtle snobbery as well as a handful of amusingly self-aware moments wherein characters reference various murder mystery tropes they have read about in books.
At any rate, Poirot interviews each suspect and in these miniature interviews Christie vividly and succinctly captures the particular idiosyncrasies and psychological states of each character. Poirot learns that Ratchett was receiving threatening letters before his death. The hands on his watch have been frozen at 1:15, the chef de train suspects a woman is secretly the culprit because the stab wounds appear to be frenetic and inconsistent (they seem to come from both right and left-handed people), and several characters report seeing a tall person wearing a scarlet kimono with dragons on it walking down the hallway in the night, and another character claims to have had a terrifying run-in with the murderer in her own compartment. This all serves to befuddle Poirot, Bouc, and Doctor Constantine. What could it mean?
“I am not a magician, mon cher. I am, like you, a very puzzled man. This affair advances in a very strange manner” (190).
But the first big breakthrough in the case comes when Poirot uncovers the small piece of a burnt note in Ratchett’s room which reveals that Ratchett’s true name is actually Cassetti, a notorious criminal in America who became infamous for kidnapping and murdering a young girl named Daisy Armstrong. Daisy was the daughter of Colonel Toby Armstrong (who was half-American and whose mother was a daughter of W.K. van der Halt, a Wall Street millionaire). The colonel’s wife was Sonia, daughter of Linda Arden, a famous American actress who specialized in tragedies (such as Shakespeare’s Macbeth). Their beloved only child was kidnapped at three-years-old. When the ransom money was provided, the child’s body was found. After this, a pregnant Mrs. Armstrong then delivered a stillborn child and died herself before her broken-hearted husband shot himself. The whole story became a media firestorm in the United States. And there was yet another death in the story – that of a nursemaid who claimed to know nothing of the crime and eventually threw herself out a window, unable to bear the intense scrutiny from the general public. Somewhat unbelievably, Cassetti escaped charges on a technicality and assumed a new name: Samuel Ratchett. However, these revelations only serve to significantly deepen the mystery.
With the whole Armstrong family apparently dead, who could have killed Ratchett? Was it an attack by a rival gang? Or an act of private vengeance? Could it have been a Corsican mobster? Or the dour work of a cold Anglo-Saxon? Was Ratchett killed by a woman? Or was the culprit a small dark man with a womanish voice as described by several characters?
The key suspects are as follows:
- Mary Hermione Debenham: a twenty-six-year-old English lady who left Baghdad the previous Thursday and is headed to London. Efficient and severe, she is too efficient to be a “jolie femme” per Poirot (this theme of which characters are a “jolie femme” continually pops up in the novel). She was previously a governess for a family in Baghdad.
- Colonel John Arbuthnot: A tall military man, between forty and fifty years old, with brown skin, who has been on leave in India and is now returning home.
- Caroline Martha Hubbard: an elderly loquacious American widow. She claims there was a man in her compartment the night of the murder. She constantly refers absently to her daughter and she is a teetotaler.
- Pierre Michel: the Wagon Lit Conductor. He is a Frenchmen who lives near Calais, and is described as respectable and honest though perhaps not a particularly bright individual.
- Antonio Foscarelli: a big swarthy Italian man from Chicago. He is a proud businessman who has been living off and on in the United States fourteen years. Unlike others, he is proud of the United States and its business-minded productivity.
- Princess Natalia Dragomiroff: a cosmopolitan Russian princess whose husband came into his money before the Revolution and wisely invested abroad. She is an older lady wearing a pearl necklace, sable coat, fancy rings, though she is also described as ugly. She is traveling home to Paris from Constantinople, she has been staying at the Austrian embassy with her maid, Hildegarde Schmidt. Sonia Armstrong was her god-daughter, she was friends with her mother Linda Arden.
- Hildegarde Schmidt: the maid of Princess Dragomiroff. She has worked for the princess for fifteen years, she comes from an estate of the princess’s late husband in Germany. In the night, she claims to have encountered a small dark man with a womanish voice.
- Hector Willard MacQueen: a thirty-year-old American who has worked as a secretary for Ratchett for just over a year. MacQueen first met Ratchett in Persia, but he is originally from New York. His father was the district attorney who handled the Cassetti case. He claims Ratchett always took a sleeping draught at night when traveling by train.
- Edward Henry Masterman: a pale Englishman, he is a thirty-nine-year-old valet who has worked for M. Ratchett for nine months.
- Greta Ohlsson: a forty-nine-year-old Swedish woman, the matron in a missionary school, she is a trained nurse and is headed to Lausanne to visit her sister.
- Count Rudolph Andrenyi: he has a diplomatic passport and was recently staying at the Hungarian embassy with his wife. They have only been married a year. He claims they were sleeping through the night and had nothing to do with the murder.
- Countess Elena Maria Andrenyi: wife of the Count.
- Cyrus Bethman Hardman: a big flamboyant American, age forty-one, a traveling salesman for typewriting ribbons. But, as it turns out, he is actually a detective from New York trailing a pair of crooks in Stamboul. He claims he was retained by Ratchett to track down an assailant, a small, dark man with a womanish voice –a description which curiously applies to no one on the train.
Of note, all throughout Murder on the Orient Express there is a quiet examination of cosmopolitanism. Various situations show a latent enmity between Britain and America –“Europe wants waking up. She’s half asleep” (211). The contrasts between the two cultures are stark. And this novel was published back in the early half of the 20th century when the United States was still regarded as a bastion of progressive, forward-thinking people in the world whereas Europe was still thought of as the ‘old country’ (in many ways those stereotypes have reversed in the 21st century). The group trapped aboard the Simplon Orient Express serves as a small, enclosed sociological experiment wherein people from many different nationalities are brought together in unusual manner, while the investigators are routinely confronted with their own racial or gender prejudices (i.e. ‘a Frenchman would never think that way’ or ‘Italians are known for their mafia-like stabbings’ or ‘women are unlikely to stab people with a dagger’ and so on). But as we are periodically reminded in the works of Agatha Christie’s, people from all walks of life are animated by the same impulses, regardless of gender or nationality –people everywhere are motivated by greed, hatred, and revenge.
“Even if in the end everybody on the train has a motive for killing Ratchett, we have to know. Once we know, we can settle once and for all where the guilt lies” (290).
Solution (Spoilers Ahead)
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Divided into three parts –Part One “The Facts,” Part Two “The Evidence,” and Part Three “Hercule Poirot Sits Back and Thinks”—as Murder on the Orient Express unfolds, Poirot carefully makes a startling discovery after Mrs. Hubbard faints after finding a bloody dagger in her sponge bag, and Poirot finds the red kimono on his very own bag. A search of all the passengers’ luggage yields a conductor’s uniform with pass key and a missing button inside Hildegarde Schmidt’s suitcase. Poirot starts to realize these people are who they seem –they all share intimate connections with the Armstrong family.
Poirot reaizes that a smudge on Countess Elena Maria Andrenyi’s passport has blotted out an “H.” Her real name is Helena, and her maiden name is Goldenberg (the true name of the stage actress Linda Arden). She is actually the younger daughter of the Goldenbergs, and the younger sister of the late Sonia Armstrong. She married Count Andrenyi when he was an attaché in Washington. Next, we learn that the “H” on the embroidered handkerchief is actually Russian for “N,” or the Princess Natalia. Then we learn the lady Debenham was the governess in the Armstrong household when little Daisy Armstrong was kidnapped. Antonio Foscarelli was the Italian chauffeur (known as “Tonio”) in the Armstrong house, while Greta Ohlsson was the nurse in charge of Daisy, and Ratchett’s valet Edwrd Masterman was Colonel Armstrong’s batman in the war and then served as his valet in New York. Colonel Armstrong saved Arbuthnot’s life during the war, Pierre Michel’s daughter was the Armstrong’s dead nurserymaid who hurled herself out a window, and Cyrus Hardman was hired by the group to track down Ratchet.
“I said to myself, ‘This is extraordinary –they cannot all be in it!… And then, Messieurs, I saw the light. They were all in it. For so many people connected with the Armstrong case to be traveling by the same train by a coincidence was not only unlikely, it was impossible. It must be not chance, but design” (306).
As it turns out, there is not one single culprit, but rather the whole group was working together to exact revenge on Ratchett and when the Orient Express became trapped in the snow, they decided to carry out their plan anyway. Ratchett’s secretary drugged him before each member of the group stabbed Ratchett (hence the haphazard stab wounds) and thus no one knows exactly who killed Ratchett, but they all played a part. The Englishman “Mr. Harris” who was initially to take the berth that Poirot later occupied was merely a myth devised by the group in order to fill the whole carriage. They did not expect the great Hercule Poirot to be aboard the train. Mrs. Hubbard confesses it all. Only in America could such a cosmopolitan group have come together under the Armstrong household –an Italian chauffeur, an English governess, a Swedish nurse, a French lady’s maid and so on.
However, there is an additional twist. Poirot offers the group two alternatives, both being plausible theories as to what happened to Ratchett. His first theory (deliberately obfuscating) is that actually an outside party boarded the train disguised as a train conductor and carried out the deed. Poirot offers this theory, somewhat coyly, knowing that Ratchett was an abhorrent individual who got what was coming to him. As the novel ends, M. Bouc and Doctor Constantine pledge to tell the Yugoslav authorities that Poirot’s first theory is actually the correct one. In doing so, they give a pass to the whole group and steer the authorities toward an unsolvable mystery. Christie shows that sometimes forgiveness is unethical and that telling lies can actually be the just thing to do –murder is justified through extra-legal means only when a vile criminal like Cassetti/Ratchett comes along.
Christie, Agatha. Murder on the Orient Express. Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2011 (originally published in 1934). It was dedicated to M.E.L.M. (an acronym for her second husband Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan) Arpachiyah, 1933.