The book was incredibly well plotted, and left you admiring the writer’s skill in showing how clever her detective was to uncover the mystery. I thought that it was interesting to read an old fashioned, classic detective novel. The head of the train company Monsieur Bouc, who is also travelling on the train, asks Poirot to investigate and so the story continues with Poirot interviewing all the passengers travelling in the same carriage as Ratchett – and having to work out which statements are true and which are false. When Ratchett asks why, Poirot says it is because he doesn’t like his face!ĭuring the night, Poirot hears strange noises from other compartments in the carriage and next morning he discovers that Ratchett has been murdered in his compartment, by being stabbed twelve times. However, Poirot refuses despite the man (named Ratchett) offering him large amounts of money.

The next day on the Orient Express, the same man requests that Poirot takes on his case as he says that his life is in danger. Murder on the Orient Express is one of Agatha Christie’s most famous novels, owing no doubt to a combination of its romantic setting and the ingeniousness of its plot its non-exploitative reference to the sensational kidnapping and murder of the infant son of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh only two years prior and a popular 1974 film adaptation, starring Albert Finney as Poirot - one of the few cinematic versions of a Christie work that met with the approval, however mild, of the author herself.At the start of the book Poirot is at a hotel in Turkey, after finishing a case, and is sitting down to dinner when he notices an American tourist who he observes has the eyes of an animal and an air of evil about him. Fortunately, the brilliant Belgian inspector Hercule Poirot is also on board, having booked the last available berth. With no escape into the wintery landscape the killer must still be on board.

Incredibly, that compartment is locked from the inside. Passengers awake to find the train still stranded and to discover that a wealthy American has been brutally stabbed to death in his private compartment.

While en route from Syria to Paris, in the middle of a freezing winter's night, the Orient Express is stopped dead in its tracks by a snowdrift.

Murder on the orient express book