Book Review - Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie

I think I’ve resisted reading this book for so long because I’ve known for years about the twist ending. It didn’t seem particularly smart to be indignant about spoiler alerts for a 77-year-old book, so I just let it go. After finally rousing myself to read this classic, though, I feel better for the effort.

There isn’t too much plot to synopsize, between the singular focus on the murder mystery itself and what most readers already know about it. Hercule Poirot’s train ride was supposed to be an uneventful trip between two other cases, but the discovery of a murdered man complicates matters. After the train gets stuck in a snowdrift, Poirot can’t help but bend his considerable mind to the task.

The first few chapters drag a little bit, but that’s only because they exist solely to set up the famous parlor-room-on-rails. The rest of the book is entirely devoted to Poirot’s interviews of the other passengers, his examination of the evidence, and his eventual deductions. When this became clear to me, I began to take umbrage; no character arcs? No twisting subplots? What is this, some kind of stereotypical locked-room mystery, where I just look at the evidence and try to figure out who the killer is before the hero does?

Then I came to my senses. Yes, Justin, that’s exactly what it is. This is Agatha Christie. All of the other people writing this way are copying her. I had that same cognitive interrupt while I was reading Lord of the Rings, where it took me a little while to realize that things only look clichéd because I was reading the benchmark that spawned the clichés.

Knowing that, I can see why this book is a classic. It really is tightly woven, and unfolds with just the right amount of suspense. There were a few other small issues I had with it, such as the occasional convenient addition to the evidence at the eleventh hour, and the tendency for the American characters to sound like British people dressing up as cowboys (“Quite right, this is plumb crazy!”). But things never got boring, once I got past the setup. And even knowing how the murder played out ahead of time, I was still eager to get to the end and figure out the details of how everything went down. Maybe it was a little easier for me to puzzle it out, since I had a heads-up on what to look for, but it was still fun to read. The ending is as sparse as the rest of the book in terms of detail, but the story ends on such a genuinely satisfying note that I didn’t really want or need anything more.

In short, this is the perfect introduction to the mystery genre, and a slick and exciting read for fiction readers in general. Of course, I kind of feel like I can never read another locked-room mystery again, but the read was worth it.

Verdict: 4 / 5