First Class

The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I think this was my third reading of The Mystery of the Blue Train and, as ever with such Christie revisitations (there being 66 works), I had no recall whatsoever of the perpetrator of the crime.

This made it all the more frustrating, as I tried unsuccessfully to spot the clues – and, frankly, I don’t think Hercule Poirot spotted them either. I reckon the author presented him with some sneaky snippets of inside information; and even he admitted that: “unless you are good at guessing, it is not much use being a detective”. I can’t see that washing in a job interview.

Agatha Christie was quoted as saying that she would write most of a novel and then choose the least likely perpetrator. If this were true, then it must have involved a lot of backtracking. And it shows. I bumped over a good half dozen poorly filled plot-holes, and others that became apparent with hindsight. I think she quite simply created workarounds to explain the improbable – for instance, in this book, the unlikely disfigurement of the victim, merely to explain away a minor inconvenient detail. Cumulatively, these little ‘cheats’ undermine the credibility of the storyline.

I have concluded that an ingenuous approach is best; sit back, relax and enjoy the journey. Certainly, this is literally a journey – and it paints a pleasing picture of upper-class life, lived between London, Paris and the French Riveria during the late 1920s. Penned almost a century ago, it is in its way a cosy piece of historical fiction. And there is Poirot in his pomp.

I expect I’ll read it again.



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