Among the murder, mayhem, chaos and crisis, there is also order and calm
There are few crime writers who wouldn’t acknowledge Agatha Christie as being among the most influential of the last 100 years.
I grew up with her, and I don’t mean we were childhood pals – no heckling from the back, please! But the TV of my childhood was dominated by film adaptations of her books: Murder Most Foul, Murder Ahoy, Murder At The Gallop.
I devoured horror, mystery and thrillers so was a sucker for anything with murder in the title and as a child these were all deemed safe enough for me to view.
The ones featuring Hercule Poirot were even better – Murder On The Orient Express and Death On The Nile – lots of murder, but with the added bonus of exotic intrigue of faraway lands. It was the movies that pointed me toward the books and to this day Murder On The Orient Express starring the inimitable Hercule Poirot remains my favourite Christie.
If I had to sit down and dissect it, I’d need to admit the plot to be ludicrous, the characters two-dimensional and the ending far-fetched – but that’s not what Christie is about. For me her books are the ultimate cosy-crime.
I know writers don’t always regard that as a compliment. MC Beaton, of Hamish Macbeth and Agatha Raisin fame, told me she’d bestow a “Glasgow Kiss” on anyone who described her books as cosy – and she was 82 at the time. But you know where you are with Agatha Christie. Among the murder and mayhem there is order. Among the chaos and crisis there is calm.
And none as orderly as Hercule Poirot himself. “There is right, there is wrong,” he says, “and there is nothing in between.” That describes his character and his moral compass perfectly.
Yet in Murder On The Orient Express this fundamental principle is compromised. First published in 1934, it has all the hallmarks of a great mystery. Like most of Christie’s books, we’re introduced to the characters one by one, slowly drip-fed a morsel of their story, a hint of their past, and we know that there will be some tenuous connection. But no one is what they seem and a vital link pulls the main players and the threads of the story together, as well as the wonderful Poirot who finds himself as a fellow passenger by chance.
So when one of the travellers is killed – the odious Ratchett whom we all secretly hoped would be a goner from the get-go – there is no doubt the killer has to be one of the passengers or crew, with no means of escape when the train becomes derailed and stuck in a snow drift.
The ending is a bit far-fetched but we know that we’ve been part of a great piece of theatrical staging.