Murder on the Orient Express – Warning Spoilers
Warning – Spoilers Ahead
Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express has the claustrophobic but exciting element of a train ride, and the fact that the train takes a traveller to or from “the Orient”, in this case Istanbul, gives an added exotic frisson. The American title – “Murder on the Calais Coach” makes it appear almost banal.
The book is a masterpiece of clever plotting, in which a murder is committed in what appears to be a “locked room” – a train caught in a snowdrift, with a sleeping coach which is cut off from the rest of the train, in which we find our suspects. Who can it be?
In classic style, clues and red herrings lead one way and another, but this is one of Christie’s clever murders where it turns out that the only correct solution is that all the suspects took part in the crime.
This, and the claustrophobic atmosphere of incarceration on the train, was reproduced very well in the first major cinema version – the Albert Finney version.
Warning – Spoilers Ahead
Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express has the claustrophobic but exciting element of a train ride, and the fact that the train takes a traveller to or from “the Orient”, in this case Istanbul, gives an added exotic frisson. The American title – “Murder on the Calais Coach” makes it appear almost banal.
The book is a masterpiece of clever plotting, in which a murder is committed in what appears to be a “locked room” – a train caught in a snowdrift, with a sleeping coach which is cut off from the rest of the train, in which we find our suspects. Who can it be?
In classic style, clues and red herrings lead one way and another, but this is one of Christie’s clever murders where it turns out that the only correct solution is that all the suspects took part in the crime.
This, and the claustrophobic atmosphere of incarceration on the train, was reproduced very well in the first major cinema version – the Albert Finney version.
Don Gilbert sums up the case as follows:
“A man, Ratchett, is killed on the Orient Express. Ratchett’s true identity is Casetti, the one responsible for kidnapping and killing a child, Daisy Armstrong. Casetti, though, escaped justice, and the jury system failed. On the train, however, twelve of the passengers were somehow connected to the Armstrong family, and they get together and kill Casetti, each stabbing him until he is dead. Thus, the jury system triumphs, convicting and executing the criminal. In both the Finney film version and the novel, Poirot easily accepts the twelve killers on the train as a jury, and agrees to cover up their crime by saying the killer is some unknown man who escaped from the train.”
But the TV movie version, starring David Suchet as Poirot, makes a very different ending to the story.
“In the Suchet version, Poirot does not accept the killers as a jury, and believes they should all hang for the crime. Suchet’s Poirot, though, in the end reluctantly agrees to lie to the police, but he is clearly disturbed when he does.”
“A man, Ratchett, is killed on the Orient Express. Ratchett’s true identity is Casetti, the one responsible for kidnapping and killing a child, Daisy Armstrong. Casetti, though, escaped justice, and the jury system failed. On the train, however, twelve of the passengers were somehow connected to the Armstrong family, and they get together and kill Casetti, each stabbing him until he is dead. Thus, the jury system triumphs, convicting and executing the criminal. In both the Finney film version and the novel, Poirot easily accepts the twelve killers on the train as a jury, and agrees to cover up their crime by saying the killer is some unknown man who escaped from the train.”
But the TV movie version, starring David Suchet as Poirot, makes a very different ending to the story.
“In the Suchet version, Poirot does not accept the killers as a jury, and believes they should all hang for the crime. Suchet’s Poirot, though, in the end reluctantly agrees to lie to the police, but he is clearly disturbed when he does.”
The blog Austen Prose elaborates on how this different version builds up to unsettle Poirot:
“While interrogating a British army officer in Palestine, Poirot catches him in a lie and the officer pulls “his revolver and commits suicide right in front of him. This alone is a shocking image, but Poirot’s unemotional reaction to his death was so chilling that there is no doubt that screenwriter Stewart Harcourt (Dracula) and director Philip Martin (Wallender) have taken an entirely different approach in their interpretation of the cosy mystery fare that we have become so accustomed to on Masterpiece Mystery.”
“Next Poirot is in Istanbul and he witnesses another pointless death of a woman accused of adultery being stoned by a mob of her family and neighbours. Is this a foreshadowing of what is yet to come for us aboard the Orient Express? Both of these scenes are added embellishments to Christie’s original novel and definitely not in the 1974 candy coated film”
So why are these scenes added? Suchet was coming to the end of his time as Poirot, and at this point he is portraying a much darker Poirot than the novel. These scenes set the tone for a much bleaker ending, where Poirot is far less accommodating than in the Finney movie.
But there is still a legacy from the original novel of the reasoning that this is justice, and that case is made:
John Arbuthnot: Now you listen, Poirot... by all accounts this man deserved to die last night... but I would have been happier if he'd been convicted by a jury!
Hercule Poirot: I see. Twelve good men and true?
John Arbuthnot: The civilized way.
Yet there is also a deeper sense of Poirot’s Catholicism, that he sees matters of justice in much more absolute terms than the killers:
Hercule Poirot: [furious] You people! With your kangaroo jury, your kangaroo justice! You had no right to take the law into your own hands!
Hildegarde Schmidt: M-m-monsieur Poirot, she was *five years old*!
Caroline Hubbard: We were good civilized people, and then evil got over the wall, and we looked to the law for justice, and the law let us down.
Hercule Poirot: No! No, you behave like this and we become just... savages in the street! The juries and executioners, they elect themselves! No, it is medieval! The rule of law, it must be held high and if it falls you pick it up and hold it even higher! For all of society, all civilized people will have nothing to shelter them if it is destroyed!
This is almost akin to Thomas More’s argument about doing away with the law in “A Man for All Seasons”, which is interesting because Catholicism looms large there too:
Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.
In this adaptation, Poirot has to live with the knowledge that it is an imperfect world, but it is something which will trouble and haunt him.
“While interrogating a British army officer in Palestine, Poirot catches him in a lie and the officer pulls “his revolver and commits suicide right in front of him. This alone is a shocking image, but Poirot’s unemotional reaction to his death was so chilling that there is no doubt that screenwriter Stewart Harcourt (Dracula) and director Philip Martin (Wallender) have taken an entirely different approach in their interpretation of the cosy mystery fare that we have become so accustomed to on Masterpiece Mystery.”
“Next Poirot is in Istanbul and he witnesses another pointless death of a woman accused of adultery being stoned by a mob of her family and neighbours. Is this a foreshadowing of what is yet to come for us aboard the Orient Express? Both of these scenes are added embellishments to Christie’s original novel and definitely not in the 1974 candy coated film”
So why are these scenes added? Suchet was coming to the end of his time as Poirot, and at this point he is portraying a much darker Poirot than the novel. These scenes set the tone for a much bleaker ending, where Poirot is far less accommodating than in the Finney movie.
But there is still a legacy from the original novel of the reasoning that this is justice, and that case is made:
John Arbuthnot: Now you listen, Poirot... by all accounts this man deserved to die last night... but I would have been happier if he'd been convicted by a jury!
Hercule Poirot: I see. Twelve good men and true?
John Arbuthnot: The civilized way.
Yet there is also a deeper sense of Poirot’s Catholicism, that he sees matters of justice in much more absolute terms than the killers:
Hercule Poirot: [furious] You people! With your kangaroo jury, your kangaroo justice! You had no right to take the law into your own hands!
Hildegarde Schmidt: M-m-monsieur Poirot, she was *five years old*!
Caroline Hubbard: We were good civilized people, and then evil got over the wall, and we looked to the law for justice, and the law let us down.
Hercule Poirot: No! No, you behave like this and we become just... savages in the street! The juries and executioners, they elect themselves! No, it is medieval! The rule of law, it must be held high and if it falls you pick it up and hold it even higher! For all of society, all civilized people will have nothing to shelter them if it is destroyed!
This is almost akin to Thomas More’s argument about doing away with the law in “A Man for All Seasons”, which is interesting because Catholicism looms large there too:
Roper: So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.
In this adaptation, Poirot has to live with the knowledge that it is an imperfect world, but it is something which will trouble and haunt him.
The 2017 movie treads similar ground but in a different way.
It all hinges on a quote from Poirot where he solves a crime earlier in the story, not one mentioned in the book, but invented by the writers:
Hercule Poirot: There is right. There is wrong. There is no in-between
This leads to a different ending. As the Inverse.Com website review explains:
“After Poirot discovers that every single suspect was part of the murder, he gives them an ultimatum. The only way they’re going to get away with this is if they kill him, but the whole thing is a ruse. Poirot makes sure the gun, which he presents to the suspects, isn’t loaded — which means he was testing them to see how far they would go. This scene is nowhere in the book, and one Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green created for the film.”
“The people who conspire to kill him in Murder on the Orient Express are all enacting revenge, their own sense of justice. So, in discovering the killer is everyone, and the victim deserved it, Branagh felt that he needed to switch things up by giving Poirot an actual moral quandary to wrestle with. “We need someone more morally absolute than we are. Poirot,” he says. “There is right; there is wrong; there’s nothing in between. He needs to be faced with this problem: Can murder be justice?”
Poirot has to learn to live with an imperfect world: “I have understood in this case that the scales of justice cannot always be evenly weighed and I must learn for once to live with the imbalance.”
Both these later finales are very different from the book and earlier film, which set up the rationale for the denouement by preparing the ground.
"In fact, Colonel Arbuthnot, you prefer law and order to private vengeance?" said Poirot
"Well, you can't go about having blood feuds and stabbing each other like Corsicans or the Mafia," said the Colonel. "Say what you like, trial by jury is a sound system."
Which leads Poirot to the solution, pulling that back:
"And then, Messieurs, I saw light. They were all in it. For so many people connected with the Armstrong case to be travelling by the same train through coincidence was not only unlikely: it was impossible. It must be not chance, but design. I remembered a remark of Colonel Arbuthnot's about trial by jury. A jury is composed of twelve people— there were twelve passengers—Ratchett was stabbed twelve times.”
And this trial by jury aspect is again emphasised once more:
"Ratchett had escaped justice in America. There was no question as to his guilt. I visualised a self-appointed jury of twelve people who had condemned him to death and who by the exigencies of the case had themselves been forced to be his executioners. And immediately, on that assumption, the whole case fell into beautiful shining order.”
And when Linda Arden explains, she again evokes that:
“Colonel Arbuthnot was very keen on having twelve of us. He seemed to think it made it more in order. He didn't like the stabbing idea much, but he agreed that it did solve most of our difficulties.”
And Linda Arden brings forward the case for not taking the events to the authorities:
"Well," she said, "you know everything now, M. Poirot. What are you going to do about it? If it must all come out, can't you lay the blame upon me and me only? I would have stabbed that man twelve times willingly. It wasn't only that he was responsible for my daughter's death and her child's and that of the other child who might have been alive and happy now.”
“It was more than that: there had been other children kidnapped before Daisy, and there might be others in the future. Society had condemned him—we were only carrying out the sentence.
“But it's unnecessary to bring all these others into it. All these good faithful souls—and poor Michel-and Mary and Colonel Arbuthnot—they love each other. ..." Her voice was wonderful, echoing through the crowded space—that deep, emotional, heart-stirring voice that had thrilled many a New York audience.”
Throughout, Christie is very cleverly weighing matters – trial by jury, Ratchet definitely being guilty without a shadow of doubt, but beyond the death penalty, and the fact that being a cold-hearted killer who blackmailed, he could easily revert to form and is therefore still a menace to society.
Notice how Arbuthnot is opposed to vigilante justice, but in favour of trial by jury, and how the crime has those echoes of trial by twelve people good and true.
This is also not an angst driven Poirot, but one who appreciates that justice is not the same as the law. He’s not so bothered with the moral complexity as if Ratchett might be innocent – we know he is not and so does Poirot. We see the characters of those taking part, all lives wounded by the crime, but also a burning sense that justice must be done.
Christie grew up in a world where, in 1934, when she was writing, the death penalty was still on the statutes. Although not all her characters approve of the death penalty, it appears that she herself saw it as part of the British justice system, and she was not squeamish about it, not did she really think the legal system could malfunction: in her view, the English judicial system has never hanged an innocent person, and while a number of her plots centre around needing to prove someone innocent before they are hanged, the detective always manages that, even if in the nick of time.
But in the modern world, we see miscarriages of justice, and we know of innocent people wrongly hanged. The tradition of the Great Detective deciding where justice lies, and where the law lies – which we also find in Sherlock Holmes – is not something we are comfortable with.
Despite protestations, it always seems too much like vigilante justice, and therefore the more modern movies have to show how Poirot reconciles this conflict within himself, just as we might do.
It is notable that the character of Colonel Arbuthnot, the one character who makes such a strong case for trial by jury against vigilante justice, does not appear in the 2017 movie, and his arguments vanish with his own disappearance from the cast of characters, along with the certainties of the world of 1934.
It all hinges on a quote from Poirot where he solves a crime earlier in the story, not one mentioned in the book, but invented by the writers:
Hercule Poirot: There is right. There is wrong. There is no in-between
This leads to a different ending. As the Inverse.Com website review explains:
“After Poirot discovers that every single suspect was part of the murder, he gives them an ultimatum. The only way they’re going to get away with this is if they kill him, but the whole thing is a ruse. Poirot makes sure the gun, which he presents to the suspects, isn’t loaded — which means he was testing them to see how far they would go. This scene is nowhere in the book, and one Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green created for the film.”
“The people who conspire to kill him in Murder on the Orient Express are all enacting revenge, their own sense of justice. So, in discovering the killer is everyone, and the victim deserved it, Branagh felt that he needed to switch things up by giving Poirot an actual moral quandary to wrestle with. “We need someone more morally absolute than we are. Poirot,” he says. “There is right; there is wrong; there’s nothing in between. He needs to be faced with this problem: Can murder be justice?”
Poirot has to learn to live with an imperfect world: “I have understood in this case that the scales of justice cannot always be evenly weighed and I must learn for once to live with the imbalance.”
Both these later finales are very different from the book and earlier film, which set up the rationale for the denouement by preparing the ground.
"In fact, Colonel Arbuthnot, you prefer law and order to private vengeance?" said Poirot
"Well, you can't go about having blood feuds and stabbing each other like Corsicans or the Mafia," said the Colonel. "Say what you like, trial by jury is a sound system."
Which leads Poirot to the solution, pulling that back:
"And then, Messieurs, I saw light. They were all in it. For so many people connected with the Armstrong case to be travelling by the same train through coincidence was not only unlikely: it was impossible. It must be not chance, but design. I remembered a remark of Colonel Arbuthnot's about trial by jury. A jury is composed of twelve people— there were twelve passengers—Ratchett was stabbed twelve times.”
And this trial by jury aspect is again emphasised once more:
"Ratchett had escaped justice in America. There was no question as to his guilt. I visualised a self-appointed jury of twelve people who had condemned him to death and who by the exigencies of the case had themselves been forced to be his executioners. And immediately, on that assumption, the whole case fell into beautiful shining order.”
And when Linda Arden explains, she again evokes that:
“Colonel Arbuthnot was very keen on having twelve of us. He seemed to think it made it more in order. He didn't like the stabbing idea much, but he agreed that it did solve most of our difficulties.”
And Linda Arden brings forward the case for not taking the events to the authorities:
"Well," she said, "you know everything now, M. Poirot. What are you going to do about it? If it must all come out, can't you lay the blame upon me and me only? I would have stabbed that man twelve times willingly. It wasn't only that he was responsible for my daughter's death and her child's and that of the other child who might have been alive and happy now.”
“It was more than that: there had been other children kidnapped before Daisy, and there might be others in the future. Society had condemned him—we were only carrying out the sentence.
“But it's unnecessary to bring all these others into it. All these good faithful souls—and poor Michel-and Mary and Colonel Arbuthnot—they love each other. ..." Her voice was wonderful, echoing through the crowded space—that deep, emotional, heart-stirring voice that had thrilled many a New York audience.”
Throughout, Christie is very cleverly weighing matters – trial by jury, Ratchet definitely being guilty without a shadow of doubt, but beyond the death penalty, and the fact that being a cold-hearted killer who blackmailed, he could easily revert to form and is therefore still a menace to society.
Notice how Arbuthnot is opposed to vigilante justice, but in favour of trial by jury, and how the crime has those echoes of trial by twelve people good and true.
This is also not an angst driven Poirot, but one who appreciates that justice is not the same as the law. He’s not so bothered with the moral complexity as if Ratchett might be innocent – we know he is not and so does Poirot. We see the characters of those taking part, all lives wounded by the crime, but also a burning sense that justice must be done.
Christie grew up in a world where, in 1934, when she was writing, the death penalty was still on the statutes. Although not all her characters approve of the death penalty, it appears that she herself saw it as part of the British justice system, and she was not squeamish about it, not did she really think the legal system could malfunction: in her view, the English judicial system has never hanged an innocent person, and while a number of her plots centre around needing to prove someone innocent before they are hanged, the detective always manages that, even if in the nick of time.
But in the modern world, we see miscarriages of justice, and we know of innocent people wrongly hanged. The tradition of the Great Detective deciding where justice lies, and where the law lies – which we also find in Sherlock Holmes – is not something we are comfortable with.
Despite protestations, it always seems too much like vigilante justice, and therefore the more modern movies have to show how Poirot reconciles this conflict within himself, just as we might do.
It is notable that the character of Colonel Arbuthnot, the one character who makes such a strong case for trial by jury against vigilante justice, does not appear in the 2017 movie, and his arguments vanish with his own disappearance from the cast of characters, along with the certainties of the world of 1934.
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