It's a sad fact that, with my eyesight deteriorating again I can make out that image better as a photograph on the computer than looking at it 'in real life'....
Be that as it may this was Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie and of course I had read it before. I was 10 when I read my first Christie (during a very wet holiday on Arran where my mother bought The Murder of Roger Ackroyd for something to do and I read it when she had finished it. Thus began a lifelong love affair with the crime fiction genre - not that it was called that when I was a child - and I had read the whole Christie canon barring a few short stories by the time I was fifteen. I preferred Miss Marple to Hercule Poirot, and probably still do to be honest.
I was dreading re-reading this in a way because I haven't read any Christie for a long time, although I have some BBC Radio Dramatisations on my tablet which I use when I can't sleep. I find They Do It With Mirrors particularly useful for curing insomnia. In the meantime I have become accustomed to thinking of Christie in the way she is talked of these days as a bit of a second class writer; fantastical plots, stereotypical characters, ,producing puzzles rather than stories etc etc.
A lot of this is true, and if you want a fantastical plot then MOTOE is probably the GoTo example, and its not far behind in the stereotypes for characters department either. On the other hand there are some quite amusing touches , and Poirot on the page is not quite the caricature that recent film and TV versions of Christie's books have made him.
There was an unwittingly chilling moment. The book was first published in 1934 and there was no reason then for Christie not to put into the mouth of a German character, commenting on a murder, the sentiment that "We are not so wicked as that in Germany". Not many years later history would give the lie to that in a particularly terrible way.
Leaving that last aside though, I rather enjoyed this book, certainly more than I had anticipated and I decided that Christie was a better writer than I had remembered. So a hit rather than a miss for this one I think.
I keep my Christie audiobooks as “comfort listens” - something I can turn to when my brain is tired - and they work well for that. I too prefer Miss Marple. I love that she is generally overlooked and ignored by people, and regarded as just a silly little old lady - but has seen all kinds of human nature in her life, and uses that important experience to fathom out the crime!
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