Sunday, January 14, 2018

Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie


Title: Murder on the Orient Express
Author: Agatha Christie
Pages: 212
Finished: January 14, 2018

First Sentence: It was five o'clock on a winter's morning in Syria.

Summary: Hercule Poirot, world famous private detective, finds himself investigating a murder while on a train ride back to London.

Thoughts: My only experience with this before reading the book was watching the Poirot episode that aired on Masterpiece Theatre in 2010ish. So I had a vague notion of what happened, but not much.

This was my first ever Agatha Christie read. It was... interesting. The mystery itself was fun, if a little farfetched. I was a little shocked at the broad stereotyping of both the sexes and the nationalities. I've noticed in most of the classics I've read that were written by women, women characters aren't so horribly treated as they are in male novels. This one was definitely an outlier in that respect. (The crime must have been committed by a woman because it was passionate?) And then they used the nature of the crime and people's nationality to accuse?

M. Bouc and the doctor were both rather ridiculous, but then they were there to be a foil, so I suppose it wasn't so horrible. I was totally misled by one character, but that's because the adaptation I fuzzily remembered had changed his character. In general, I appreciated the novel as an easy read for the start of my classics journey in 2018.

After I finished, I found the Poirot episode I remembered watching many years earlier and watched it. There were quite a few characterization differences, and plenty of changes to the story that explained my confusion while I was reading. It was an interesting enough adaptation, and I've already put the 2017 movie on hold for when it comes out at the library. I'll definitely be checking out more Christie works in the future.

Read for Back to the Classics 2018 Challenge.

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