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This is my first read of Agatha Christie. Knowing she’s one of the classics, I told my friend this and she said to me, “Isn’t Agatha Christie a racist antisemite?” I took to google to puzzle out the truth, and the unsurprising truth is that Ms. Christie was indeed a product of her times. But Rohl Dahl is also antisemitic and I loved James in the Giant Peach and Matilda as a kid. Hemingway was a fascist and Salinger dated teenagers, none of “the greats” have a clean leger. This book was assigned as book of the month in my book club and so I had to read it in order to participate in a discussion about it. It was impossible for me to separate my disdain for Christie’s worldview from the material in the book-- for example, when Poirot makes the deduction that such a clever crime could have only been carried out by a sharp, Anglo-Saxon mind, or Bouc’s supposition that the Italian was involved simply because “Italian’s have hot blood”, it was hard for me to see these as credible, especially since these are the hunches that pay off in the end. Furthermore, crime/detective novels should be tense and full of suspense and speculation, but Christie robs us of that because the mystery is solved predicated on information the reader doesn’t have.

The train is at a standstill and someone is dead in a locked compartment. Who could it have been? On the train happens to be Hercule Poirot, a renowned detective. The victim asks for his protection, Poirot says no, and the next morning he is discovered dead. Poirot only takes on cases he finds fascinating, and now that the deed is done, he’s certainly interested. He moves up the train with the same questions to everyone, smugly (absurdly, really) armed with the knowledge that the murder has something to do with a kidnapping/child trafficking situation in America. Poirot deduces this from three scorched words on a mostly burned note, and from there he builds the rest of his stupid case. He makes another grand supposition that it couldn’t have been a stranger off the train, for there are no tracks in the snow. To that I wonder, why couldn’t the attacker have strafed the train, or better yet, climbed atop it and waited for the coast to be clear?

The alibis of the passengers start getting fishier and fishier. One by one, people are unveiled as friends or family to the victim Rachett, the murdered guy, killed in America. And one by one, the passengers come up with carefully constructed lies to cover each other over the time of death. A little before this and around this time I began to suspect everyone. I felt very clever for having guessed it, but upon reflection, I feel a little disappointed. Still, despite how ludicrously improbable the ending was, the motivations of all the characters who participated and the decision of Poirot and Bouc to mislead the police is a good opener to a discussion about justice.

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funny lighthearted mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

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