Murder à la Agatha Christie, Once Again
By Jonah Raskin
Whether you live in India, Japan, France, the United States or almost anywhere else in the world, you can be sure that Murder on the Orient Express will be in a movie theater near you this holiday season. Agatha Christie’s novel of the same name will also be on the shelf in a local library or a bookstore, and if it’s not, then it will be available in paperback on Amazon. Readers might want to say that Murder on the Orient Express is a pleasure they feel guilty about. Others might just feel guilty.
The new edition offers a cover image of a locomotive and a series of passenger cars, along with the words, “Look for the major motion picture coming soon.” In the era of the SUV and the 747, trains appeal to the romance of travel that was spawned by the railroad industry itself.
In Christie’s day, the Orient Express, which went from Paris to Constantinople and back the same way, was advertised as an exotic and luxurious mode of transportation, though the Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot says in his pseudo-French accent at the start of the novel, “The train, it is as dangerous as a sea-voyage.”
Indeed it’s dangerous for a despicable American gangster named Cassetti who is traveling under the name, Ratchett (sounds like “rat shit”). He’s running away from two murders committed in the U.S., along with a kidnapping and a suicide for which he’s responsible.
Christie was inspired by the accounts of the kidnapping and later the murder of aviator Charles Lindbergh’s 20-month-old son. She also borrowed from Edgar Allen Poe, often described as the father of the detective novel, whose short story “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” introduced readers to a Parisian detective named C. Auguste Dupin who solves the mysteries no one else can.
In “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” not the butler, but an orangutan originally from Borneo is the murderer. Ratchett is an orangutan in a suit and tie, or as one of the characters explains, “a wild animal.”
Christie’s “international detective,” as he calls himself, speaks French as well as English. Unlike Dupin and unlike those two notorious American detectives, Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, Poirot does not go into the world to seek suspects and gather clues. He doesn’t have to go anywhere. All the suspects and all the clues are with him on the Orient Express. All he has to do is asks question, go through the luggage, sit and think orderly and methodically, as civilized Europeans do, and then put the pieces together.
Bam! Solution!
Murder on the Orient Express, which was first published in 1934, and that has sold millions of copies–far more than Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Chandler’s The Big Sleep—simplifies everything for the reader. It avoids any kind of moral ambiguity, paints the characters in black and white, and provides the author herself with a platform to express her dislike of Eastern Europeans, her discomfort with Jews and her disdain for Joseph Stalin.
The characters are defined by their ethnicity; the Italians are “swarthy,” the Americans “loud,” the English “neat.” Make no mistake about it, Christie shared most of the prejudices of the English upper classes in the period between World War I and World War II as the sun began to set everywhere on the British Empire.
Not surprising, Raymond Chandler in an essay titled, “The Simple Art of Murder,” poo-pooped Murder on the Orient Express, along with the author and her detective, Poirot, who assembles the pieces, Chandler says, as one would assemble “an egg beater.” Murder might be simple, Chandler allowed, but writing about it and writing it well was as difficult as writing a masterpiece of modern fiction.
Also, not surprisingly, Chandler praised Hammett because he took “murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley,” and because he wrote for people who “were not afraid of the seamy side of things.” One might say that Christie wrote for people who were squeamish, and that she took murder out of the alley and planted it back in the Venetian vase, or at least in the first-class railroad car crossing the Orient.
In Chandler’s world “gangsters can rule nations,” “restaurants are owned by men who made their money in brothels” and “a screen star can be the finger man for the mob.” (Those words, which sound as contemporary as today’s headlines, belong to Chandler himself.) Hammett’s world was no less corrupt than Chandler’s, which explains in part why he joined the American Communist Party and then went to jail rather than name names. Sam Spade isn’t a communist, but rather a realist who knows that the workers of the world will never unite and that paradise isn’t around the corner.
Hammett published his masterpiece, The Maltese Falcon, in 1930. By then he had already published Red Harvest and The Dain Curse. The Glass Key came after The Falcon. The Thin Man was published the same year as Murder on the Orient Express. By then, Hammett’s career was in decline. Christie’s career was just beginning, though she had launched Poirot in 1920 in The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
Christie had a formula; she was disciplined enough to apply it in 66 detective novels, that feature Poirot and Miss Marple, an elderly spinster and amateur sleuth, who appeals to readers who enjoy the English countryside and the upstairs-downstairs world of servants and aristocrats.
The 2017 cinematic version of Murder on the Orient Express is all about Kenneth Branagh, the actor, producer, director and screenwriter who was born in working class, Protestant Ireland and who seems determined to show the world that nothing will keep him down, including the star-studded cast that includes Johnny Depp, Judy Dench, Penelope Cruz and Michelle Pfeiffer.
As Hercule Poirot, Branagh is cerebral, comic, icy cold and given to making speeches to the camera, which goes over as well as a cop among the kinds of eccentric criminals that Hammett and Chandler created. Christie didn’t care for what she called the “American crime novel.” It struck her as unreal because it didn’t accord with her sense of British morality.
When she created an American detective in Murder on the Orient Express she called him “Mr. Hardman.” Poirot isn’t a hard man or hard-boiled, but rather soft, sentimental and old-fashioned. “I find the American woman less charming than my own countrywomen,” he tells Hardman. “The French or Belgian girl, coquettish, charming—I think there is no one to touch her.”
Like her detective, Christie thought in terms of types: the American man, the American woman, the French girl and more. But perhaps her types are the secret of her success. Perhaps they’re what readers and viewers really want and not complex characters like Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe who live among criminals for so long that they come to think and act like them.
“Me, I was part of the nastiness now,” Marlowe says at the end of The Big Sleep. That kind of psychological insight was beyond Christie, though she created characters as nasty as Chandler’s. Hers are wealthy and well mannered. So, their nastiness comes across as old-world charm that alas, was doomed to be destroyed by “the great civilization” of America (as one character calls it) that Christie would have traded any day for the glamour of the Orient Express.
Jonah Raskin is the author of The Mythology of Imperialism.