Murder On The Orient Express (1934)

PLOT: Seriously - have you not seen the film? Businessman found dead on famous train.



Is this the most famous Christie because of the film? It certainly has to have one of the best plots or plot twists.

But it also works on several other levels. The setting is fabulously exciting, and the snowdrift strands the suspects strangely outside time. The feeling is that the murder has placed everyone beyond the world, and they can't be reached until Poirot has solved the crime. Which makes it sound like Donnie Darko, but still...

Christie has gathered together a wild variety of exciting characters as suspects. Death On The Nile will see an even wilder bunch of travellers, but we've still got everything from Russian Princesses to Indian Colonels, all drawn remarkably vividly and somehow fitted into the world's most famous train.

The book's only problem is THAT film. The film is so memorable, the denoument so striking that, wonderful as the book is, it's a bit of a plod.

Other twist novels repay re-reading just to see what's going on. But this one somehow fails as the enormity of what Christie is doing hangs over it like a flashing neon sign saying "Get On With It!".

It rewards perseverance, however, as the subtle knitting of the wool that's being pulled over Poirot's eyes becomes more apparent - sometimes in lines of dialogue so thunderingly obvious you wish you could slap the Belgian for not solving the crime at once... and sometimes in details so gently subtle that you praise Poirot for picking up on them.

The curiosity of the book is that the solution is so ingenious that it is merely Poirot's presence that solves the crime. It would be impossible otherwise... and yet Poirot himself makes some remarkable leaps.

For instance, in a room full of dummy clues he somehow seizes on the one real one and uses it to unpick the case by a bizarre series of flea-like intellectual leaps. As a reader you do sometimes feel like crying "oh, come on now", such as when he unmasks someone as a secret cook.

Poirot is at his most admirably ludicrous in this book. When asked "Do you belong to the United Nations?" he responds "No, I belong to the world." And so it goes on - this remarkable character carefully concealing any impossible leaps of logic under those brilliantly waxed moustaches.

Poirot again acts almost as an agent of fate. When he turns down Mr Ratchett's offer of work ("I do not like your face"), the millionaire's fate is sealed, just as happens to Linnet in Death On The Nile. The difference between the books is that in Death On The Nile, Poirot wants justice. In this book the detective is simply consumed by solving the puzzle - justice comes second to proving his own brilliance.

It's also a remarkable book in that, complex as it is, Christie is able to withhold the solution until a mere five pages from the end with Poirot's genre-tipping exclamation of "This is extraordinary - They cannot..."

And, once Christie has torn up the rule book, she jumps very neatly on the pieces with a final twist that is as morally satisfying as it is unusual, both for Christie and for the golden age of crime. "I have the honour to retire from the case..." remarks Poirot, as though he senses this is his finest hour.

NEXT: Bridget Jones meets James Bond in They Came To Baghdad.

The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928)

PLOT: Divorse! Diamonds! and Dead Heiresses on the Blue Train to Nice.



James: Written when Christie was going through her divorce, this book suffers as a consequence. It's not that it's bad, but that the events were perhaps preying on her mind.

On the one hand it's a dry run for Murder On The Orient Express and Death On The Nile - glamourous setting, a background of intrigue, a doomed millionaire, suspicious supporting artists... and yet...

At heart it's a tale of two heiresses. There's Ruth Van Alden the tough woman of the world. And then there's Katherine Grey (note the name) - the dull one. Is Christie working out her complicated feelings towards her first husband through these two women?

Poor Ruth has been trapped in a messy marriage with a philandering husband and is trying to escape for a little happiness. Of course, she is one of Christie's doomed heiresses, and she won't trouble us for longer than to convince us of her flaws.

By contrast, Katherine has come into some money and is learning how to live. She's almost impossibly saintly and forms an instant rapport with Poirot over romans policier, as he calls them. She's striving to fit into international society but her heart belongs in... St Mary Mead!

St Mary Mead is another strange trace element in the book, which takes a while to get going and then goes all over the place. We open with mysterious jewel thieves and international assassins. Then we've Ruth's domestic drama, then St Mary Mead and the questions over Katherine's inheritance, then the Blue Train and then it's villas and hotels and police stations and beaches and Moonbase Alpha.

Murder on the Orient Express makes much more use of the single setting of the train and the restrained approach makes it a claustrophobic book, whereas Mystery Of The Blue Train plays out rather like a holiday novel with a bit of crime nibbling at the edges.

Similarly, Death On The Nile does all its set up in the first chapter and dumps us straight in Egypt, compared to Blue Train's hundred pages of set up before "And then the train started."

It's full of loose ends, or ideas that will be made more of in later books. The double-whammy of jewel theft and heiress slaying will reoccur in Death On The Nile, but this time as part of a triple twist.

When we next see St Mary Mead, there will be no mention of inquistive Katherine Grey, nor of her old lady friend Amelia Viner, who has a sharp understanding of human nature and a wicked intelligence... but we can see where this one is going. We'll even see Poirot taking on another female sidekick who is an Agatha Christie figure, but we'll have to wait a while for that.

This is nowhere near as bad a book as Christie makes out. Written at a time when she was having understandable trouble trusting men, it does have a strangely dual approach to them. The main suspect is a no-good toy boy who is undeniably attractive - and he's by no means the worst man in the book.

Poirot himself does all right here (even getting the attentions of a lady). He is on fine form, but sadly missing the narrative skills of Hastings, all pomposity without the leavening that Hastings provieds. He's really just there to solve the mystery. He doesn't feel like a super brain with the wings of fate beating at his shoulder. He's simply the world's greatest detective.

NEXT: Shall we have another go at that? It's Murder On The Orient Express

Death on the Nile (1937)

PLOT: An heiress is slaughtered on a Nile Cruise.




Death on the Nile an obvious place to start a detour onto International Christie, a world of luxurious hotels and outrageous travelling companions.

It's as though Christie has suddenly realised the marvellous variety of people you can meet on holiday (indeed, she even admits so in the preface to the Penguin edition), and that foreign travel allows an easy jamming together of murderers, terrorists and jewel thieves in a way that would seem improbable in St Mary Mead but is somehow excusable on the Nile.

This isn't the first time Christie has tried this, but it's a great place to start as it's just so confident.

We start with a dazzling first chapter that reads like a film script as we leap from scene to vivid scene - hopping across characters and continents, setting everything up like a complicated jigsaw.

When we reach Egypt a sharp reversal has taken place. The loveable heiress has become a man-eater, her bumbling best friend a spiteful stalker. Shcok reversal! What looked to be the story of how Linnet marries the wrong man and covets her best friend's husband has instead become the fallout from Linnet stealing her best friend's man.

This clearly places Linnet as The Victim. She's nice, she's generous, she's clever and witty, but she's made a fatal error in stealing Simon. Curiously, Poirot gives her a chance to confess her sin to him, but she refuses, and so is marked for death.

The first half of the book is full of scenes like this, where Poirot almost begs people not to commit crimes. Whilst priding himself on his deductive brain, he shows himself as keen a student of human nature as Miss Marple. If only they would listen to Poirot then nothing would happen, and this would be the dullest Christie, rather than one of the greatest.

Immense machinery is being wheeled into place that only Poirot can sense. Everyone else is looking at the historical wonders of Egypt, but Poirot is looking at every one of his fellow passengers and thinking Very Carefully about them. Thank god he never flew by RyanAir.

A secretive novelist, a shady lawyer, a communist, a financier, a society boy, a wise traveller... the list of characters rolls out and out, and must eventually be reeled back in at the end of the book in a way that is slightly maddening but also immensely satisfying. This is a book where almost anyone and everyone could have done it... which is an idea for later.

Once the murder actually happens (and it takes forever) a whole whirl of seemingly unconnected events are unleashed, and the buildup pays off greatly. There's an enormous sense of "well, since X and Y can't have done it, then that means..." which is quite thrilling.

An early review demands you read it twice ("Once for enjoyment and once to see how the wheels go round" The Times), and this is as rewarding a read if you know who did it. The first time is about Agatha Christie's intelligence, the second reading flatters the reader's intelligence. The sheer impossibility of the crime plays off against the "no, now hang on, so the maid's actually... ah....".

That said, there is a moment where Poirot is wrong. He claims to have misattributed overhearing the phrase "We've got to go through with it now", but, if you check he hasn't (It's in Chapter 7, and Poirot's recollection is in Chapter 29).

The "funny little man" is seen through the eyes of other characters, as for once, Captain Hastings isn't here. The poor fellow would muddle things too much, and his chances of managing to solve a murder and a terrorist conspiracy are doubtful. But dear old Colonel Race is allowed to show off his intellect, so long as he constantly defers to the cleverness of Poirot, who, in his own quiet way, must defer to the cleverness of Miss Christie.

NEXT: The wheels come off The Adventure Of The Blue Train...

The Mirror Crack'd From Side To Side (1962)

PLOT: A filmstar moves to St Mary Mead, sees something awful, and it's not the lower middle classes.


James: As a Late Marple this is a smart contrast to Murder At The Vicarage, and proves that, whatever telly people think, Christie moved with the times.

St Mary Mead now has a modern housing estate and a supermarket. Jane Marple is forever starting stories about "how this is just like when the parlourmaid..." and then realising that no-one knows what a parlourmaid is.

This isn't a book about nostalgia, it's about the importance of Moving On and Letting Go, both for the murderer and the hero. Miss Marple may be very old, but she's determinedly "with it". Not, perhaps, as with it as Swinging Dame Margaret Rutherford, but quite determined to go and find out about the Housing Development. No sooner has she been introduced than she's off there on a visit and smartly prevents a murder.

Reassured that times may change, but human nature doesn't, Miss Marple sails through the rest of the book. This may be a story where Miss Marple takes a back seat, but she's the best back seat driver in the business.

Dear Dolly Bantree and Inspector Craddock rush around doing her work for her. Where Miss Marple used to rely on spying things from her garden and nipping out for gossip, now she must wait for events to be reported to her over sherry. She barely even meets the principal cast, but that doesn't stop her from Knowing Them.

The story itself (What Did Happen At The Village Fete?) rolls on without her. In another late book we see Miss Marple as Nemesis, and here she is the gentlest kind of Avenging Fury, popping round for a spot of tea and unravelling at the very end when events have played themselves out.

A big joy for the book is Miss Marple's live-in carer, Miss Knight. Jane Marple may have defeated serial killers and gun-wielding lunatics, but she's almost outwitted by dreadfully nice, frightfully mumsy Miss Knight. Against the patronisingly jolly tide of cushion-plumping and forced naps, we see Miss Marple at her most acidly rebellious. Oh, if only she could get away with pinning a murder on Miss Knight...

Miss Marple is as complicated as ever. Like a rural Buddha she dispenses wisdom ("People aren't really foolish. Not in villages"), but she's also not above dismissing best friend Dolly Bantree for extolling the virtues of marriage "with a spinsterish cough". Despite now having a reputation as The Old Lady Who Solves Murders, she's still the same sharp, practical woman, easily sidetracked from solving murder by an interesting dressmaking problem.

Despite being dedicated to Margaret Rutherford, this book is about a film star as unlike Rutherford as possible, the kind of fragile beauty David Niven wrote about. Christie depicts a *very* 60s world of pill-popping filmmakers living on nerves and cocktails. It's a milieu she depicts sharply but without ever going into great detail (Does she ever write about films elsewhere?).

This is also a book with a great number of villains. One doesn't even break the law, another commits a horrific crime accidentally, one goes on a killing spree, and yet another may even get away with murder. Above them all is Miss Marple who sharply and immediately understands each of them - indeed, spends a large amount of the book being oddly cruel about one character who we can only think quite fondly of.

There's some oddness here as well, most of it to try and make a fairly simple mystery more complicated - there's a remarkable coincidence about ex-husbands, abandoned children, some casual racism, and a good deal of talk about interior decorating, but the main thrust of the book is about Miss Jane Marple solving a crime without ever meeting the murderer.

NEXT: All abroad for Death on the Nile

Murder is Easy (1939)

PLOT: Serial killings! Gay satanists! Sinister villagers! A cat called Wonkey Pooh!


James: How brilliantly unlike Murder At The Vicarage this is - and yet, how also fittingly of the same set. This is the Agatha Christie jigsaw at its best, worked out like a diabolically ingenious game of Cluedo. Valiant hero, Brainy heroine, Kind-hearted Lord of the Manor, Apple-cheeked old lady, Sinister Shopkeeper, Busty Barmaid, Smug Doctor, Grieving Widow, etc... all the pieces are wheeled onto the board, but by making a couple of genius twists, it's a whole new board game.

Just one example is the way that the Lord of the Manor here is ghastly new money. We've had a hint of this before in The Seven Dials Mystery, but the idea is marvellously fledged out here, as we see the many ways in which a little bit of social disorder upsets the entire balance of the village.

The village of Wychwood is halfway between St Mary Mead and the Wicker Man. There's gossip and twinkly old maids, but there's also a sinister tinct of black magic hanging over the villagers. We have a barmaid who is dutifully sluttish, widows who mutter of "something evil" afoot... and we even get... A GAY IN THE VILLAGE!!!

Antiques Dealer Mr Ellsworthy has escaped from The League of Gentlemen. With his hands the colour of a rotten corpse, his strange manners, and his fondness for pagan sacrifice, he's an odd beast indeed, not helped by the epithets "artistic", "mincing", "queer", "Miss Nancy" and even (my! sides!) "gay" that are heaped upon him and his purple-shirted colleagues. It's not even worth trying to reclaim him as a "noble" depiction that clearly belongs to his times - just find him genuinely creepy and disturbing, and quail at the "something unpleasant" which is promised for him at the end of the book. No doubt meted out by God-fearing Christians in a dark alley with hob-nail boots.

Loathe him or loathe him, Mr Ellsworthy is a hint that this is Agatha Christie gone wrong, and marvellously so. The social niceties are barely observed here, as our dim-witted but valiant hero blunders around pretending to research death cults, blithely asking if anyone's raised the dead, missing clanging clues, accidentally falling in love and playing abysmal tennis.

Poor Luke Fitzwilliam makes a great contrast to the Vicar narrator of Murder in the Vicarage. With the Vicar we have, if not an intellectual equal to Miss Marple, at least a decent second, but dear Luke is the fellow Captain Hastings cribbed prep off with mixed results. Forever wandering down lonely lanes, placing himself in jeopardy, and missing big clues, it is, you feel, only his sheer goodness that saves him from being yet another casual victim.

For this is the thing about Murder Is Easy - the death toll is Enormous! Up until this point, we've looked at books with pretty much a single murder and a feeling of brooding menace, but all that's bunged out of the window. This is a gleeful death-a-thon, with the sheer volume of victims adding to the macabre humour of it all. One of the many things wrong with Wychwood is that no-one's really noticed - with people dropping on all sides they're too busy muddling through to think that there's anything wrong. Well, that is apart from a couple of valiant sidekicks and reliable old sorts.

Spoilers:

Of course, the real delight of Murder Is Easy is that it's an Anti-Marple book. Agatha Christie got on to the joke before anyone else - what if the saintly pensioner sleuth committed all the crimes and drove her colleagues to destruction with a merry laugh, a twinkling eye, and a slightly bitter pot of Lapsang Souchong?


Poor crazy Miss Wayneflete is an utter joy. There's really not that much mystery to this book (beyond wailing "How can you not have spotted?" as the hero trots down yet another lonely lane where "anything could happen"), but there's considerable fun in Miss Wayneflete's delight at realising that she's about to get away with it all again. "I know who did it!" Luke will proclaim, causing Miss Wayneflete to give a nervous start, before he announces that it's definitely the earnest young Doctor/ the Lord of the Manor / that Sinister Gay with a fondness for getting cock all over his hands.

There's even a touching psychology underpinning all this. Miss Wayneflete's madness stems from social humiliation, sexual repression and cruelty to budgies, her fragile psyche kept going only by Victorian Values and regular slayings.

This is a joyous, joyous book, and features a welcome cameo from Inspection Battle.

NEXT: The Mirror Crack'd From Side To Side

Murder At The Vicarage (1930)

PLOT: When Colonel Protheroe is murdered in his study, the Vicar must solve a crime with the help of his neighbour, Jane Marple.

"In St Mary Mead everyone knows your most intimate affairs. There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands."

James: Miss Marple is born old. She's a character hard to imagine in her youth (although writer Julian Symons has a young her solving crime with Sherlock Holmes), and she steps straight into The Murder At The Vicarage:

"Miss Marple is a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner - Miss Wetherby is a mixture of vinegar and gush. Of the two Miss Marple is much the more dangerous."

According to the novel's earnest narrating vicar, St Mary Mead is a village that thrives on humdrum scandal, where a change in shaving foam is a considerable sensation - but by the end of the book, you've realised that the novel's vicious crones and gossiping servants have all been looking in the wrong direction - for St Mary Mead is a village that contains thieves, impostors, vigilantes, tragic heroines, sinister archaeologists and, of course, a murderer. In some ways you suspect that Miss Marple turns to solving crime merely to clear all of this drama out of the way so that she can go back to detecting pregnancies and infidelities.

For St Mary Mead is a village that finds itself in a detective story. This is mentioned several times, beginning in the very first scene "Makes one think of detective stories" announces lovely Griselda, the vicar's wife, revealing that she's addicted to them. Later on we discover that Miss Marple has been hurriedly educating herself with a steady stock of them from the village library (a tiny, lovely detail which makes its way gloriously into the Margaret Rutherford films, where Miss Marple storms the local library demanding the latest Agatha Christie).

This air of Cluedo hangs around the victim, the safely unloved Colonel Protheroe, who barely appears even in flashback. Whereas the matriach of A Mysterious Affair At Styles was one of the book's more vivid characters, the dead Colonel is more a grotesque vacuum. This is entirely approrpriate for Miss Marple - wheares Poirot is most interested in the mechanics of a crime, the spinster is much more of a psychologist, and the book turns on Miss Marple's acute perceptions of the lively characters that inhabit it, as opposed to Styles' rather sketchier figures. Which makes it all the more curious when you realise that, in many ways, these are very similar stories with very similar solutions.

But everything in the world of St Mary Mead is wonderfully vivid. Remember the BBC's marvellous Miss Marple title sequence? A rolling series of pencil sketches of village life, each Arcadian idyll gradually revealing skulduggery, evil, and the odd corpse on the cricket lawn? That's St Mary Mead captured perfectly. Christie's characters are all marvellous - even her thumbnail sketches such as "Miss Hartnell, who is weather-beaten and jolly and much dreaded by the poor". We get the suspiciously scattter-brained deb Lettice Protheroe, an enigmatic professor digging up a barrows, a slatternly secretary, a louche artist, a rude policeman - it's all in there. And, of course, the servants.

Servants and gossip go together in Agatha Christie like electricity and wiring. Whispers and "it's not my place to be listening at doors to be sure" have figured prominently in earlier books, but it is in this book that the details of the crime are carefully knitted together by Christie's supreme gossip spider. The vicar wryly observes "In St Mary Mead the best authority is always somebody else's servant". "Ah, that explains something the maid said," is a typical comment of Inspector Slack's about a murderous threat overheard. It's all very delicately done - the observation of chance details, the genteely unstated suggestion that an alibi is unpicked by a maid during her afternoon delight with the fishermonger's boy.

This is an assured comedy, where murder must muddle along as best as it can. The vicar and his marvellous wife are as worried about the crime as they are about their awful maid. Miss Marple must similarly manage her audacious deductions whilst being genuinely flustered by her awful nephew, serious novelist Mr Raymond West - "Murder is so crude," he remarks, "I take no interest in it", to which Miss Marple can't resist commenting "Raymond and I have been discussing nothing else all through dinner."

What is a serious novelist doing in this book? His poems may have no capital letters and Miss Marple, while genuinely concerned about his comfort and his pipe tobacco, finds time to say "He writes very clever books, I believe, though people are not nearly so unpleasant as he makes out. Clever young men know so little of life..." Can it be that Agatha Christie is having a wry pop at serious fiction?

The people of St Mary Mead are all flawed, to various degrees villainous, but all of them deeply, vividly human - as seen in the remarkable scene where the vicar suddenly preaches a sermon of fire and vengeance, stripping the village bare with his words. The book is full of moments like this - for all the tea and scandal there is a maniac who slashes portraits in attics...

Even Miss Marple is not quite the sainted avenger that repute would have us believe. She is referred to as "dangerous" and "unpopular" a surprising number of times. She's nice - genuinely much warmer than the other retired Furies of the village, but her sheer acuity is what makes her feared. Nothing, absolutely nothing escapes her notice, and the book sees her settling scores and playing cards she has held close to her chest for years. But even her omniscience is something of a front. It's easy to assume that if the vicar handed over the narration to Jane Marple, this would be a brief pamphlet - but this is a book where, for most of its duration, Miss Marple is wrong. It's a detail that's easy to miss, but an important one - for it makes this wonderful woman all the more human.


NEXT: Black magic mayhem in Murder is Easy

The Seven Dials Mystery (1929)

Plot: A man is found dead surrounded by seven alarm clocks. Lady Bundle Brent hunts down a sinister international conspiracy.


James: The sequel to The Secret of Chimneys may not be quite the same perfect trifle, but it's doing some interesting things. There are still the Bright Young Things, but they're in it up to their necks. In the first few pages they start dropping dead, and soon it is plucky Lady Bundle Brent against the world, with only a clutch of wise friends aiding her in her mission to stay one step ahead of the machinations of the Club of Seven Dials.

Yet another deft blend of country house murder mystery with John Buchan and PG Wodehouse, this book finds time to fold in an Arnolod Bennett pop at the ex-bicycle salesman Sir Oswald Coote and his wife who just can't handle the servant problem - unlike the capable Bundle and her father, the foggy Lord Caterham. There's also a bit more restrained racism, such as when one character protests at an alias "Short of being described as Rothschild I don't mind" and there's much puzzling of the ways foreigners spell their names - but there's little to trouble the horses.

This is archly self-aware. Bundle frequently says about the sinister Seven Dials things like "They're the sort of crowd I always imagined... only existed in books" - and, as the book ticks on, the sinister club of masked adventurers seems both more menacing and more bizarre, with the theories about who these sinsister schemers could be seeming more and more improbable.

It all leads to a denouement that is both baffling and remarkable. There's no "You may be wondering why I called you here today" scene - instead, the twist is so good we hear "Get a chair for her! It's all been a bit of a shock, I can see." And then... well, what happens next is quite remarkable.

If we are cheated of the "Damn your meddling, Poirot!" unveiling, there's still a lot of unmasking, as Christie explains to us, tactfully and carefully how thoroughly she has deceived us for a couple of hundred pages. It's not unusual to arrive at the end of a Christie mystery with no idea of the villain(s), to have missed most of the clues, and to be pleasantly thrilled at our own stupidity. But this is rather like the Birmingham ferris wheel that gave a merry narration of the Paris skyline. While Christie does not lie to us, we arrive at the end having been constantly misinformed and misdirected, but having had a thoroughly pleasant journey - and with an odd yearning to go round again just to make sure.