Murder on the Orient Express
MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (Agatha Christie) - Four Stars
Believe it or not, I had never read Christie before. Yes, I know, I was missing out. I'm quite aware of that now, and I'm certain there will be more Agatha in my future.
Murder on the Orient Express is, while perhaps not the best of Christie's novels (I'm not qualified to say either way), probably the most famous. The famed Orient Express train is stuck in a snowbank in Yugoslavia. One of the passengers is murdered in the middle of the night in the elite Istanbul-Calais first-class coach. All the other passengers are not only total strangers to one another but have unshakable alibis: everyone's location at the time of the murder can be supported by the eyewitness testimony of another total stranger! And so, famed Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot must solve an apparently unsolvable case...
To detail any more of the plot would be a sin, so I'll have to find meat for my review elsewhere.
Murder... is a light and breezy read. If one is the sort of person to just sit around and read for a few hours on the weekend, one could easily dispatch the novel in a single sitting (the novel is only 210 pages). I was also surprised by the wit and humor sprinkled throughout the book. Christie had a quintessential British sense of humor: dry and sly, with sparkling intelligence and subdued understatement. Some of her choicest quips literally made me laugh aloud.
Some small bits seemed a little cheesy. Christie's habit of overemphasizing dramatic revelations in italics, for instance: The call came from inside the house! That sort of thing. But then I realized, all those old mystery-story clichés probably originated with Christie and have been carried down through the years. Indeed, far from aging poorly, I think Christie's mysteries might be even more effective as the years go by: she's is smarter than the clichés. Forget every "standard" you use when solving a mystery novel, because they won't help you with Christie. She is masterful at never letting her narrative voice waver: extremely important clues pass with nary a moment of being dwelt upon. Indeed, while I caught a fair number of legitimate clues, I also bit on almost an equal number of non-clues (I hestitate using the term "red herring" because they aren't intentionally misleading, in my opinion: Christie's ambiguity and neutral tone simply aid the reader in over-thinking some parts and leaping to conclusions on others).
Lastly, while the final revelation of whodunit is somewhat surprising (it's a very slow revelation, and the reader should start to have the idea dawn on them several pages prior), Christie saves the biggest stunner for the last hundred words (so don't read ahead). Or, as Poirot says in the last sentence of the novel...
Believe it or not, I had never read Christie before. Yes, I know, I was missing out. I'm quite aware of that now, and I'm certain there will be more Agatha in my future.
Murder on the Orient Express is, while perhaps not the best of Christie's novels (I'm not qualified to say either way), probably the most famous. The famed Orient Express train is stuck in a snowbank in Yugoslavia. One of the passengers is murdered in the middle of the night in the elite Istanbul-Calais first-class coach. All the other passengers are not only total strangers to one another but have unshakable alibis: everyone's location at the time of the murder can be supported by the eyewitness testimony of another total stranger! And so, famed Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot must solve an apparently unsolvable case...
To detail any more of the plot would be a sin, so I'll have to find meat for my review elsewhere.
Murder... is a light and breezy read. If one is the sort of person to just sit around and read for a few hours on the weekend, one could easily dispatch the novel in a single sitting (the novel is only 210 pages). I was also surprised by the wit and humor sprinkled throughout the book. Christie had a quintessential British sense of humor: dry and sly, with sparkling intelligence and subdued understatement. Some of her choicest quips literally made me laugh aloud.
Some small bits seemed a little cheesy. Christie's habit of overemphasizing dramatic revelations in italics, for instance: The call came from inside the house! That sort of thing. But then I realized, all those old mystery-story clichés probably originated with Christie and have been carried down through the years. Indeed, far from aging poorly, I think Christie's mysteries might be even more effective as the years go by: she's is smarter than the clichés. Forget every "standard" you use when solving a mystery novel, because they won't help you with Christie. She is masterful at never letting her narrative voice waver: extremely important clues pass with nary a moment of being dwelt upon. Indeed, while I caught a fair number of legitimate clues, I also bit on almost an equal number of non-clues (I hestitate using the term "red herring" because they aren't intentionally misleading, in my opinion: Christie's ambiguity and neutral tone simply aid the reader in over-thinking some parts and leaping to conclusions on others).
Lastly, while the final revelation of whodunit is somewhat surprising (it's a very slow revelation, and the reader should start to have the idea dawn on them several pages prior), Christie saves the biggest stunner for the last hundred words (so don't read ahead). Or, as Poirot says in the last sentence of the novel...
"Then," said Poirot, "having placed my solution before you, I have the honour to retire from the case..."
posted by Kevin at 8:58 PM
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