[Comments taken from a mailing list discussion. They are out of context and do contain spoilers.]
[first christie? comparisons to others?]
Nope, like many other discussers have already said I first read Christie
as a young teenager and I've been reading her on and off ever since.
There's still a million of her books that I haven't read. Murder on the
Orient Express was definitely one of the first (probably the first
actually) of her books that I picked up and the unusual plot gripped me
and has stayed with me ever since though the details have gone from my
mind entirely. I didn't know the twist at the time and I thought the
story was wonderfully clever.
[Part I]'s as far as I've got so far. I'm enjoying seeing bits of the story
to come revealing themselves to me.
Since it was the first Christie I read it's the one that conceived my
notions of her writing so it fits them exactly ;-)
I think it's one of the best. I prefer the Poirot stories to the Miss
Marple ones and I like this book, the Roger Ackroyd one and Peril at End
House for the way they break the rules of detective fiction.
It's going pretty much as I remembered so far.
The plot twist is the bit that stayed with me most, I remember loving
the on the train setting but the characters are all new to me again.
[satire? cozy? the plot?]
To be honest I didn't really feel this book was especially satirical or
tongue-in-cheek. It had plenty of humour and the characters were mostly
total stereotypes but I didn't see the satire. Perhaps I'm mising
something.
I don't think of Christie as a cozy writer either, I think she's writing
in a time period before divisions like cozy/hardboiled existed and at
the time this book was written she was pretty much making up the rules
of the genre herself.
I can't really comment on what I expected of the plot as this read
around I knew what the conclusion was. I do remember being
spectacularly impressed by the plot as a teenager. The three part
structure of the book (crime, interviews, denouement) is exactly what I
expect of Christie but I expect that's because I got my ideas of what to
expect of Christie from this book as it's not a layout that she always
[realistic characters?]
No, not really, I think most everybody in this book, good guys and bad
guys, was a shallow stereotype but I think that it was necessary for
them to be so. If the characters had been more three dimensional then
to have got the full juries worth into the book would have required a
blockbuster brick of a novel, after 200 pages a trick ending pleases the
reader but after several hundred more pages I think the book would be
denting walls around the world. Plus Christie needs to conceal many
details about her characters to have the trick plot work. To flesh
these people out without revealing their connections would be pretty
much impossible.
I didn't really find as much offensive in this book as I have done in
others from the same time period. All of the characters are
caricatures, the British as much as any of the other nationalities, no
ethnicity seemed to be degraded that much more than any other.
I don't feel they were real enough to imagine them having a life outside
the book where I could meet them.
I haven't seen any Poirot films so I can only go on what I gather from
the books to imagine Poirot. To me he's very short and small with an
oversized head full of little grey cells, a huge twirly moustache and
he's very vain and neatly dressed in a very smart three piece suit from
Paris. There's not much I like about him as a person but I enjoy his
deductive skills all the same.
I don't think he'd be that much different today. He's considered rather
odd by his contemporaries anyway so I think he'd just be pretty much as
is but even more of an eccentric in today's world.
Purchased on 12th October 2002.
nocto
