Murder on the Orient Express (novel)

Room of the Pera Hotel in Istanbul, where Agatha Christie is said to have written the novel Murder on the Orient Express

Murder on the Orient Express ( English Murder on the Orient Express ) is a crime novel by Agatha Christie with Hercule Poirot as an investigator, who clears up a murder on the Orient Express , a train from Istanbul to Calais . It was published on January 1, 1934 in Great Britain and in the same year under a different title in the USA ( Murder in the Calais Coach ) and in Germany ( Die Frau im Kimono ). The material has been filmed several times since 1974.

action

When the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot wants to book a trip on the Orient Express from Istanbul to London , the train is surprisingly already fully occupied. Only through his relationships with the director of the railway company, Monsieur Bouc, who was also traveling, did he get a free compartment.

On the journey through Yugoslavia , between Vinkovci and Brod , the train has to stop because the route is blocked by a snowdrift . At that time, an American traveler was murdered by twelve stab wounds. Monsieur Bouc asks Poirot to clarify the case.

Nobody can have left the train. The telegraph has failed, so the police cannot be notified. Thus the detective finds himself in a strange situation: He cannot obtain any information from the outside and is solely dependent on the witnesses present and the evidence available . An escape of the murderer can be ruled out, as no traces can be found in the snow. So the killer must still be on the train.

In the murdered man's compartment, Poirot finds a letter that has not been completely burned, from the rest of which he can deduce the identity of the deceased: It concerns the criminal Cassetti, who years ago kidnapped and murdered a little girl, Daisy Armstrong, who went to justice however could withdraw.

Poirot questions all the passengers in the sleeping car concerned, but neither the evidence found nor the testimony give a clear picture. Some claim to have seen a person but whose description does not fit any of the travelers.

Ultimately, Poirot sees the only solution in the fact that all witness statements are discussed and consciously constructed with the aim of making any logical conclusion impossible for him: As soon as a passenger is suspected, at least one other respondent will give a relieving statement.

Finally, Poirot gathers everyone involved in the dining car and first presents them with a simple possible solution, according to which the murderer has left the train through the snow and fled. Although he succeeds in making this theory fit for all facts, it is rejected by Monsieur Bouc as too constructed. Poirot then describes the second, his actual solution, according to which all travelers in the Calais through coach, including the conductor, had a relationship with Daisy Armstrong, who was murdered by Cassetti. Now everyone on the train has come together to lynch Cassetti. They broke into his compartment one after the other during the night and each stabbed him once. The burned letter, the only correct piece of evidence, contained the death warrant signed by everyone. In order to deceive the detective, they had to work out a clever network of exonerating and misleading evidence and testimony. Since this solution corresponds perfectly to the truth, Poirot's accurate descriptions lead to moving confessions.

There is no police on the train and therefore no legal action can be taken initially. Poirot leaves it to Monsieur Bouc to decide which of the two theories should be presented to the police at the next train station. Monsieur Bouc, deeply moved by the circumstances of the event, opts for the first option.

people

The victim:

• Samuel Edward Ratchett, a scruffy looking man with the secret of being the criminal Cassetti

The suspects:

• Hector Willard MacQueen, a tall, handsome American, works as a secretary and interpreter for the victim
• Edward Henry Masterman, the victim's English valet
• Pierre Michel, the French conductor
• Mary Hermione Debenham, a tall, strong, young British woman who works as a governess in Baghdad
• Colonel Arbuthnot, a British Army officer returning from India
• Princess Natalia Dragomiroff, an elderly Russian noblewoman and great lady
• Hildegard Schmidt, a middle-aged German woman and maid of Princess Dragomiroff
• Count Rudolph Andrenyi, a tall, strong Hungarian diplomat with English manners and clothes on his way to France
• Countess (H) Elena Andrenyi, young wife of the count
• Greta Ohlsson, a blonde, middle-aged Swedish missionary going home on vacation
• Caroline Martha Hubbard, a simple-minded, elderly and very irritable American, returning from visiting her daughter, a teacher in Baghdad
• Antonio Foscarelli, an agile Italian businessman
• Cyrus Bethman Hardman, a large, southern-looking American typewriter ribbon distributor

Investigators:

• The detective: Hercule Poirot, Belgian detective
• The director: Monsieur Bouc, director of the railway company and friend of Hercule Poirot
• The doctor: Dr. Stavros Constantine, Greek doctor examining the corpse

and display information about the image

Cabin plan in the Calais through car
blue: 1st class compartments, pink: 2nd class compartments, yellow: conductor

Relation to real events

Christie was inspired by the events surrounding the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby : Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the son of aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh, was kidnapped from his parents' home in March 1932 at the age of 20 months. After paying a ransom of $ 50,000, the toddler was found murdered.

A maid employed by Mrs. Lindbergh's parents was wrongly suspected of complicity and committed suicide after a very harsh police interrogation. This incident served Agatha Christie as a motive for the involvement of the sleeper conductor Pierre Michel in the murder of Ratchett / Cassetti by creating the maid Susanne Michel - daughter of Pierre Michel - based on the model of the maid from the Lindbergh case for the novel also committed suicide after unlawful suspicion.

The Lindbergh case had not yet been resolved at the time Murder was first published on the Orient Express in January 1934. It was not until September 1934 that Bruno Hauptmann was arrested as a suspected perpetrator. Although doubts arose in the course of the subsequent trial, Hauptmann was found guilty of murder in 1935 and executed in 1936.

dedication

Christie dedicated the novel to her second husband, Max Mallowan . She had previously dedicated The Secret of Sittaford to him, and she did not dedicate her last novel Age Guards From Acumen to him either .

reception

Although the novel is considered one of the most famous and beloved by Agatha Christie, it has also found a number of critics. Raymond Chandler was particularly negative :

“And now another murder by Agatha Christie, in which M. Hercule Poirot, the resourceful Belgian who speaks a French that has the level of the literal translation of a Quartan, participates, where he dutifully maneuvers with his“ little gray cells ”. M. Poirot decides that no one in any given sleeping car could have committed the murder alone, and therefore concludes that everyone was involved, and divides the process into a series of simple acts such as assembling a whisk for the kitchen . That's the sort to which even the keenest mind surrenders. Only a half-idiot could come up with this idea. "

Comparison with other works

Murder on the Orient Express is one of Agatha Christie's novels in which the perpetrators are not brought to justice, and the only one in which the perpetrators consciously get away as free people. In the other corresponding novels, the perpetrator has the opportunity to evade the impending execution by suicide (including alibi , Das Haus an der Düne ), he dies during exposure ( murder on the golf course ) or simply disappears from the scene ( Die big four ).

Another novel in which a real existing famous passenger train is the setting for the plot is The Blue Express . Christie uses the same name, Pierre Michel , for the train attendant in both novels .

Murder on the Orient Express is one of the few works by Agatha Christie set in winter. The others are The Secret of Sittaford and The Mousetrap .

Film adaptations

The novel was filmed twice for the cinema and three times for television. First star-studded in 1974, directed by Sidney Lumet . Albert Finney played Hercule Poirot.

A modernized version by Carl Schenkel with Alfred Molina as Poirot was created for US television in 2001 .

In 2009 a third film adaptation was made in the series Agatha Christie's Poirot with David Suchet in the leading role.

In 2015 , the Japanese broadcaster Fuji TV broadcast a two-part film adaptation of the book. The names and the venue were moved to Japan. Hercule Poirot became Takeru Suguchi, played by Mansai Nomura, and the train went from Shimonoseki to Tokyo .

In November 2017, a fifth film adaptation was released with another star cast. The film is being shot under the direction of Kenneth Branagh , who also played the lead role.

Issues and titles

The novel first appeared under the title Murder on the Orient Express on January 1, 1934 in the United Kingdom (Collins Crime Club, London). The American first edition appeared later that year under the title Murder in the Calais Coach (Dodd Mead and Company, New York). The choice of this title became necessary because in 1933 the novel Stamboul Train by Graham Greene had been published in the USA under the title The Orient Express .

The German first edition was published in 1934 by Goldmann Verlag Leipzig under the title Die Frau im Kimono in a translation by Elisabeth van Bebber. In 1951 the title was changed to The Red Kimono by Goldmann Munich. With the start of the first film adaptation for the cinema (1974) , the title of the novel was also changed to Mord im Orient-Express (Deutscher Bücherbund). In 1999 Scherz Verlag published a fundamental new translation by Otto Bayer.

Audio books

• 2003 Murder on the Orient Express 3 CDs. Read by Stefan Wilkening . Director: Caroline Neven Du Mont. Abridged version by Angela Thomae. Translated from the English by Anja Hansen-Schmidt. Munich: The Hörverlag
• 2004 Murder on the Orient Express 6 CDs. Unabridged reading. Speaker: Martin Maria Schwarz . Director: Hans Eckardt. Translation by Otto Bayer. Marburg / Lahn: Publishing house and studio for audio book productions
• 2014 Murder on the Orient Express 1 MP3 CD. Unabridged reading. Speaker: Friedhelm Ptok . Translated from the English by Otto Bayer. Munich: The Hörverlag

Web links

• Murder on the Orient Express on the official Agatha Christie website
• Murder on the Orient Express (1974) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Murder on the Orient Express (2001) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Murder on the Orient Express (2010) in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ On Lindbergh and child abduction see: Andrew Scott Berg: Charles Lindbergh. An idol of the 20th century , Blessing, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-89667-089-1
2. ↑ Raymond Chandler: Mord ist nicht Kunst ( The Simple Art of Murder, Essay), here quoted from Jochen Vogt (Ed.): Der Kriminalroman I. On the theory and history of a genre (= UTB for science, volume 81). Fink, Munich 1971, ISBN 3-7705-0625-1 or ISBN 3-7705-0628-6 , p. 174.
3. ↑ Oriento Kyūkōsatsujinjiken from Fuji TV (Japanese)
4. ↑ Steven Spielberg Pentagon Papers Drama Gets 2017 Oscar Season Release . In: Variety , September 6, 2017. Retrieved April 22, 2017.  (Eng.)
5. ^ John Cooper, B. A. Pyke: Detective Fiction - the collector's guide. 2nd Edition. Scholar Press, 1994, ISBN 0-85967-991-8 , pp. 82 and 86.
6. ↑ American Tribute to Agatha Christie (English).
7. ^ German first edition in the catalog of the German National Library .
8. ^ The red kimono (1951) in the catalog of the German National Library .
9. ^ Mord im Orient-Express (1974) in the catalog of the German National Library .
10. ^ New translation in the catalog of the German National Library .
11. ^ Audiobook (licensed) in the catalog of the German National Library
12. ↑ Audiobook (complete 2004) in the catalog of the German National Library
13. ↑ Audio book (complete 2014) in the catalog of the German National Library