Information
Finished reading date: January 14th, 2023
My rating (out of 5): ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Genre(s): Mystery
Summary
Hercule Poirot is on the case when a murder is announced to have happened on the infamous Blue Train. Ruth Kettering, the only daughter of American millionaire Rufus Van Aldin, leaves behind a slew of suspects: her estranged husband, Derek, who receives her fortune upon death; his dancer mistress, Mirelle, who is known to be expensive; her thief lover, the Comte de le Roche, who knows of the famous Russian rubies that were given to her by her father; and more.
Poirot adopts one Katherine Grey, who finds herself caught up in the murder as one of the last people to see and talk with Ruth before her death, as a partner in capturing the criminal at hand. Clues and people of interest abound as they seek to give a voice to the dead.
Analysis Rant
Christie has a fantastic way of creating and designing scenes and characters in a way that the ending is very likely unforeseen. Anyone could have done it, and yet, when she lays everything out in the end, it makes sense that it was the person in question over the others.
Her characters are often extremely human, giving room for plenty of sins, as well as misguided thoughts, feelings, and actions. There seems to be very rarely any type of lesson to be learned within the book or any much depth, and yet, it is captivating in the way that everything comes together in the end like a puzzle. The victims are often not made of that much different stuff than those that killed them, and this just goes to show that darkness exists within all human nature. While murder does not erase the own sins of the victim, everyone deserves justice for being wronged, especially when it is the ultimate crime.
I have read several of her books, and I read them very much like escapism literature. Often, the books are more about the events rather than the characters themselves. The characters are needed for the events to take happen and to understand why they happened. But we are there for the fact that the events happened in the first place. Without the events, there would be no story. This book was one of the few that I was actually able to see half of the ending by the end, but not the whole picture. I think that she does a really tremendous job of not giving away the ending within the hints. She gives just enough so that it makes sense when it arrives, but holds enough back for the big reveal so that we are not able to guess it entirely.
I’m curious about her planning process as, to me, it almost feels like she starts with the murder and then backtracks to see what situation and who could have caused it, building things up from there, and scattering the hints throughout the piece.
When I consider stories, I think this is probably accurate to real-life cases. Very often, it’s the missing information that draws all the clear information together. If there is no missing material for the reader, if everything is all laid out, then it rather stinks of a book rather than a story that might actually happen. It may feel more contrived and constructed. That’s not to say that Christie’s books don’t have an air of convenience periodically in the final reveal, but I think it’s our misbelief that everything is complicated which gives rise to discontentment for understandable motive and background. There usually is something else going on in the background, and as readers, it’s valid for us to not know everything. If we know everything, then of course, it’s more likely for us to guess the ending. Perhaps one might say that’s unfair to the readers, as they are less likely to be able to guess for themselves. Personally, I find it less fun when I’m able to guess than when I am not at the end. I like the journey and putting the pieces together, but I also like to be surprised. That’s not to say that I agree with really random missing pieces of information. It has to be coherent. And Christie’s novels usually very much are.
And although I don’t often feel particularly attached to characters in her books, I found Katherine Gray to be a unique specimen. She was written in an extremely smart and attractive but not annoying way. She wasn’t played into a dichotomy, and was highly feminine while still modest and remained clearheaded and strong yet emotional. It’s lovely to be able to see a kind and generous girl still be smart and play a key role in figuring out the murder. Her little piece of deception helped me to like her all the more, as it just showed that she was a girl who could still be level-headed when charming men came along and that she was able to keep her priorities straight while still being able to feel attachment. There was just very little play into currently popular tropes of girls being full tomboy warriors who are unique and have very little emotion or just really ultra-feminine characters without any personality or depth. Gray felt complex and far more complete than some other characters I have read and played an interesting comparison to the other women in the book, showing the range of characters we can find in the female sex without having to try so hard.
One thing that was a little bit difficult within the book for me was keeping everyone and all their relationships straight. There was an air of “everyone knows everyone” sort of connection that I don’t always love because the “it’s a small world” bit can only read so well for so long. At the end of it, I’m still not sure that I got everything, but that’s also because I didn’t study the book. I just read it and consumed it, so I picked things up and forgot them as quickly as I turned the page a lot of the time. There were just a lot of players involved, and their roles were all quite steeped in history, and that was just a bit more difficult for my one-cell brain to follow at the end when it all came together. It very much was the type of book that I would have to read everything over again to fully get everything but was also not the type of book that I care enough about to read again immediately. Maybe in a few years, I could pick it up again, but by that time, knowing my track record, I would have forgotten the ending as it was.
I liked the idea of starting the book with a historical scene and connecting that to the ending. But to be honest, the reveal of the connection happened quite deeply into the book, and there was already a significant amount of false names used in the book, so it was just difficult for me to remember and follow. I went back to the beginning again after finishing, and some made sense while some I was just a bit too lost about. Once again, it’s likely going to require a full attentive read to pull everything together for me. It does kinda show how easy it is to miss things that we don’t recognize as important while reading mysteries. Christie seems to play into this to help with the ending reveal, and the way that she throws these hints is often very smooth. They are usually just a quick sentence without a huge amount of tone change. It’s almost like she is allowing us to witness it from the perspective of the characters themselves as they are experiencing it. They don’t know it’s a clue, so we don’t know it’s a clue… until the reveal happens and Poirot in his genius is able to remember and pull everything together. For someone like me, though, who doesn’t read these books super intentionally often, a sentence is just a sentence, and that often gets lost. The likelihood that I will even remember that it happened is not impossible but not always likely. But that’s also par for the course of human psychology and attention.
With that being said, though, I appreciate that the author is not terribly visible within the writing. We see it as the characters see it, rather than seeing just what the author wants us to see and is showing us what to pay attention to (or misdirecting us to pay attention to something else). Christie does do a fair amount of misdirection sometimes, but I feel like this book was done very expertly without much of any of that. We can constantly tell that Poirot is unsatisfied with the way the case is going, and thus, that allows us to be able to be unsatisfied with it as well.
Overall, a very enjoyable read although quite complicated. I thought it was interesting that there was a fair bit of mysticism with the ending of this one as well, which doesn’t happen often in the reveal. There is sometimes a bit of superstition or folklore involved in the opening and when the murder is still unexplained, but it’s unusual for the reveal to maintain a bit of the supernatural. It didn’t feel awkward or too convenient, though, I thought, considering who it was centered around. If Poirot was the one to experience it, it would have felt out of character, but it made sense as it was.
Writer’s Takeaway
- Don’t give the readers everything. Give enough to give them the satisfaction of working through the mystery, but always hold back the explanation of something until the end. But be careful of consistency.
- Questions for writing a murder mystery:
- Who is the victim? How did they die? What situation(s) surrounded or caused their death?
- Who is the murderer? What caused them to kill? What is their motive?
- Who are the other players involved? The red herring?
Recommended Books
- Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie