Summary
Chapter 1
The novel begins on a train platform in Aleppo, Syria, early in the morning. Our narrator shows us that two men are speaking in French: one, Lieutenant Dubosc, is seeing off another, Hercule Poirot. Dubosc thanks Poirot profusely. He has evidently performed an important task for the French army, though the reader is privy to few specifics. Poirot brushes off the compliments, reminding Dubosc that he, in fact, once saved Poirot’s own life.
Poirot boards the train, which will be stopping next in Stamboul (or Istanbul). He takes a nap, and when he wakes up, encounters a fellow passenger in the dining car. The passenger, Miss Debenham, is a young Englishwoman returning from a post as a governess in Baghdad. She is soon joined by an Englishman named Colonel Arbuthnot, who is returning from service in India. The two, who are evidently strangers, begin to chat. Poirot observes them with amusement, especially as they awkwardly flirt.
Later, he overhears them again. They have an oddly emotionally charged conversation, where Colonel Arbuthnot expresses indignation that Miss Debenham must work as a governess. Poirot finds this odd and a bit funny. Later, the train stops at a station, and all three passengers get out to stretch their legs. Again, Poirot sees his fellow passengers talking. This time, they both seem upset. Arbuthnot addresses Miss Debenham by her first name, Mary, and she interrupts him, saying, “Not now...When it’s behind us.” The next day, Miss Debenham looks tired and stressed.
Later still, the train is briefly delayed, and Miss Debenham visibly panics about the prospect of not reaching Istanbul in time for their connection. Again, Poirot finds this strange. In the end, the train reaches Istanbul on time.
Chapter 2
In Istanbul, Poirot arrives at his hotel. Just as he’s getting ready to go to his room, he opens a telegraph that has been waiting for him. It informs him that there has been a new development in the “Kassner case,” and that he is needed immediately. Displeased, Poirot cancels his room reservation, asks the hotel to book him on an overnight train to London, and goes to grab dinner at the hotel restaurant before his train departs. There, he runs into an old acquaintance: a fellow Belgian named Monsieur Bouc. Bouc is a director of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, the company that operates the Orient Express. The narrator also drops a bit of information about Poirot himself, mentioning that he is the “former star of the Belgian police force.” The men discover that they’ll be traveling together, since Bouc will be taking the train to Switzerland.
Poirot turns his attention to two American men sitting nearby. One is about thirty, the other sixty or seventy. Poirot takes a strong dislike to the older man, and tells Bouc that he senses a hidden evil underneath his benign exterior. Bouc laughs at Poirot’s dramatic attitude. Then the hotel concierge approaches Poirot to tell him that his train has no open first-class carriages. Bouc assures him that carriage 16 is always left open, and that he will be seated there. Bouc is dismayed, upon arriving at the station, to find out that even carriage 16 is booked. However, one second-class carriage remains open: Mr. Harris, who has booked it, has not shown up. Bouc tells the conductor to put Poirot’s luggage there, since hopefully Harris will not arrive. When shown to his carriage, Poirot discovers that he will be sharing with a fellow traveler: the younger American he saw eating at his Istanbul hotel. The man introduces himself as Mr. MacQueen. Poirot and MacQueen settle in as the train departs.
Chapter 3
The next day, Poirot finds Bouc in the dining car. They eat and discuss the strangeness of train travel. Bouc notes that a train trip brings complete strangers together into a kind of micro-society for a brief period. Poirot goes a step farther, noting that the possibility of a fatal accident binds them all together. He then looks around the car, observing his fellow travelers one at a time.
He first spots three single men seated together: an American, a Brit, and an Italian. His attention then turns to a notably ugly old woman, dressed luxuriously in furs and jewels. She is speaking commandingly to a waiter about her dinner preferences. Bouc interjects to tell Poirot that she is Princess Dragomiroff, a Russian aristocrat whose husband managed to invest his money abroad before the revolution. At another table he spots three women: Miss Debenham is one. Beside her is a middle-aged American, who references a daughter she has been visiting. She speaks in derogatory generalizations about people in “the East,” calling them “indolent.” A patient, elderly woman listens to her complain. Colonel Arbuthnot, meanwhile, sits alone, staring at Miss Debenham.
Poirot also spots a woman sitting alone. He believes that she may be German and is probably a lady's-maid. He also spots a well-dressed, attractive couple, and learns from Bouc that they are Hungarian diplomatic visitors. Finally, Poirot turns his attention once again to the evil-looking older American, feeling the same strong dislike he did before. Bouc returns to his own compartment, and one by one the other passengers filter out until Poirot is left alone with MacQueen and MacQueen’s employer, the evil-looking man. The man gets up and introduces himself to Poirot as Mr. Ratchett. Ratchett asks Poirot, whom he knows of by reputation, to take on a case for him. He claims to be an extremely wealthy person with an enemy, and wants Poirot’s help to remain safe from this enemy. Poirot refuses, even when an increasingly agitated Ratchett offers him huge sums of money. When asked why, Poirot answers that he only takes cases that interest him—and, furthermore, he informs Ratchett that he dislikes the look of his face. Poirot then departs.
Analysis
We begin the novel, not located securely within the point of view of our main character, but seemingly watching from the outside as Poirot speaks to Lieutenant Dubosc. Indeed, for a brief moment, we even flit into the point of view of another traveler, Miss Debenham. It is essential, for purposes of the detective genre, that the reader remain ensconced within Poirot’s point of view. After all, the reader’s knowledge must remain limited, with strict and consistent boundaries dictating what they are allowed to know: otherwise, they would be privy to mystery-solving clues or answers before the climactic revelation demanded by the genre. Here, though, the brief introduction, in which the reader must wait to fully enter Poirot’s point of view, serves two important purposes. Firstly, it indicates to readers that Poirot—regardless of his talent and even fame—remains unimportant and mostly unnoticed to other passengers. Miss Debenham notes, as she watches Poirot, that he is somewhat ridiculous-looking, with a comically large mustache. Furthermore, his status as a French-speaking foreigner makes her take him even less seriously. This creates a satisfying irony when Poirot, in his role as a detective, assumes a position of power on the train.
Furthermore, by refusing to immediately immerse us in Poirot’s mind, Agatha Christie keeps some distance between him and the reader. Thus he remains, though a vivid and generally likeable character, something of a mystery to readers. He remains larger-than-life, as much a mystery-solving literary device as a person. This is, in a sense, one of the pleasures of the mystery genre. Each character is somewhat one-dimensional, fulfilling a specific role. Three-dimensional and complex characters, after all, may act unpredictably and have complicated motivations. One-dimensional characters function better here, because the reader (and Poirot) can more easily spot inconsistencies in their behavior and link them to the mystery at hand.
At this early phase of the novel, Poirot travels from Syria to Turkey before boarding a train to Europe. Therefore the novel, even in its earliest pages, covers a great deal of geographical ground. It starts to seem like a sprawling adventure novel or travelogue. At the same time, Poirot spends most of it in a train, and by the end of chapter 3, he has become entirely ensconced within the train's self-contained society. Trains are constricted, limited spaces, propelled inexorably onward on pre-existing tracks toward their destination. This contrast—between the open possibility of travel and the pre-determined path of the train—mimics the convention of the mystery novel. Like a train traveler, the reader will meet a rich variety of people and entertain a seemingly endless number of possible answers to the question at the heart of the book. Yet, despite this illusion of choice, the reader is drawn towards one unavoidable answer, awaiting at the end of the trip.
In chapter three, Agatha Christie uses vivid descriptions and lively dialogue to describe Poirot’s fellow travelers. This keeps the reader from feeling bored or overwhelmed by a pile of new information. After all, though they may not suspect it yet, they are being introduced to a lineup of future suspects, and it’s essential that the reader is able to keep track of them. As Poirot looks around the train’s dining car, Christie paints short, memorable portraits of each individual. One way in which she does so is by giving each character a few key attributes. Princess Dragomiroff, for instance, is ugly, old, clearly wealthy, and Russian—in contrast to, say, MacQueen, who is young, American, and friendly. While perhaps the primary purpose of these wide-ranging attributes is clarity for the reader, they serve other purposes as well. For instance, because the passengers come from all over the world, they allow Christie to talk about some of the cultural attitudes they carry with them. British characters like Arbuthnot, therefore, are described as reserved, while Americans like Ratchett and MacQueen (despite their differences) are brash and talkative. One character, Mrs. Hubbard, brings certain xenophobic attitudes with her. She believes that the people in Turkey, where she has just traveled, are lazy compared to westerners. Though not heavy-handedly, Christie uses the book’s background of travel and tourism as a means to tease out tension between characters and display their flaws, preconceptions, and areas of discomfort.
Though he seems a cool observer, driven by logic rather than stereotypes, Poirot relies upon his intuition more than readers might expect for a famous detective. He is a sharp, keen observer of his fellow passengers, using nothing but the evidence of his senses to understand them. While readers might form strong opinions about these characters, Poirot seems to withhold judgment, at most allowing himself to feel bemused or mildly intrigued. There is, of course, one enormous exception. Poirot, based entirely by instinct and intuition, absolutely detests Mr. Ratchett. Indeed, he uses his senses to observe that Ratchett looks perfectly nice—his appearance indicates a “benevolent personality”—but a deeper, almost mystical sense tells Poirot that Ratchett is a bad guy. Christie makes clear that this isn’t some kind of superpower on the detective’s part, because Mrs. Hubbard and M. Bouc also take a strong dislike to Ratchett. At this point in the novel, readers are left wondering what to make of this. Is Poirot’s instinctive hatred of Ratchett a misdirection, showing that even the brilliant sleuth can be distracted by emotions? Or is it a helpful guide to the future mystery? At this point in the book, it’s far too early to tell, but readers have to begin deciding which types of knowledge they’re going to value while trying to solve the novel’s mystery: intuition, empirical evidence, or some mixture of both.
