Yuffie's Book Reviews

Murder on the Orient Express - by Agatha Christie

I may get legions of angry fans on my case, but I didn't like this book. It was a chore to get through, and I'll explain why.

First, let me explain the basic plot. Bunch of people on a train called the Orient Express, some dude gets murdered. Hercule Poirot, a detective, happens to also be on this train, so he takes on the case and figures out whodunnit.

There was no emotional investment in this case. The only reason Hercule took on the case was because hey I'm a detective, I solve things. He had no personal reason to get involved. If we're to have emotional investment in the story and its characters, the protagonist needs an actual reason to get involved, other than 'yeah why not, I got time to kill'. There were no stakes. No consequences to not solving the mystery, nor rewards for solving it.

Hercule also made extremely far-fetched reaches with his guesses. They found a (conveniently) half-burned piece of paper in the murdered dude's room with the name Armstrong on it, and suddenly Hercule is all like; OH THIS GUY IS THE MURDERER OF DAISY ARMSTRONG, THAT HAPPENED YEARS AGO. No, having the name of a very dated murder case doesn't automatically incriminate the dude. That was the worst offense of far-fetched-ness, however Hercule seemed to do it quite a bit. The actual ending was so wtf that I'm like: uh huh.... well okay then. Too much of a stretch to the point where it felt like a parody.

So now that the dead man has been (sketchily) ID'd as a murderer, that brings me to my next point. Since he was actually a criminal that deserved it, I as a reader have no emotional investment in finding the killer and bringing them to justice. The entire point of the story, the reason I should want to keep turning pages, isn't there. I don't care who the killer is. I don't want to see them brought to justice. That's a really poor set-up for a murder mystery, in terms of storytelling. I'm not invested in this at all because 1. Hercule has no reason to get involved other than he's a detective and randomly happened to be in the area, and 2. I don't care who killed the dude, how, or why.

Another major issue was that there were way too many characters. There were 13 suspects. That caused major issues on my end keeping track of who's who. This is a really short book, so I didn't get time to learn much about the characters or form any kind of meaningful emotional investment or bond to them, which means I don't care whether or not they're guilty or innocent and I'm not afraid or worried about anyone in this book. With a mystery, what keeps the reader engaged is nail-biting anxiety over finding out who did it. But the lack of stakes and emotional investment made this a tiresome, monotonous read.

The writing was quite bad, but as this was written way back in the day before there were writing conventions and craft, I could give it a pass. But there was so much extraneous filler detail, chit chatting, small talk, and just plain irrelevance.

Overall, not a great book. I do see how a book like this could be considered awesome and profound when it was published, being the forefront of the mystery genre, but in today's time, it would be considered worthy of the slush pile. I do commend Christie's attention to detail and how she kept track of 13 suspects and all their movements and actions, but there were too many characters for me to care about any of them, no stakes whatsoever, no emotional investment by me or the protagonist, and terrible writing.

2/5 stars