Despite all this, her fans say Christie has never gained the respect she deserves. The view persists, at least in some quarters, that she's actually not that good. If you tear most of these complaints apart, however, you'll see that what she is usually accused of is being a pop writer - with clichéd plots, flimsy characterization, and a style that apparently improves in translation.

All true, and all pretty much beside the point. Most criticism of pop culture is, at least as an explanation of what makes it work. One has to try and appreciate a different set of values, or recognize ways in which traditional artistic strengths can be set on their head. 

Which is another reason to start off this survey of popular literature with Christie. She sets the standard. If pop fiction can be defined, at least in part, as fiction more interested in narrative propulsion than character, then Christie really is the Queen. 

You have to wonder if it's possible to have an author less interested in character than Agatha. The phrase "two-dimensional" seems flattering. Her characters are mere counters, one-dimensional scraps and stereotypes just there to take up space, to be somewhere at a certain time, say a few lines, then get out of the way. Try "the Italian" (also known as Antonio Foscarelli, but typically referred to by his nationality). Just a few quick brushstrokes: he walks "with a swift, cat-like tread" and his face "was a typical Italian face, sunny-looking and swarthy." Can he be the murderer? After all, "what about psychology? Do not Italians stab?" "Assuredly," Poirot agrees, "Especially in the heat of a quarrel. But this - this is a different kind of crime. . . . It is not - how shall I express it? - a Latin crime. It is a crime that shows traces of a cool, resourceful, deliberate brain - I think an Anglo-Saxon brain." So scratch "the Italian" from our list.

Well, Poirot has a lot of suspects to interview, so maybe this is just the author being economical (as well as having a bit of fun with her international cast). And maybe it's meant to be misleading: giving us so little information, it can't be total garbage, can it? A typical Italian face, sunny-looking and swarthy . . . do you even read the words, or notice what they're saying? One might as well be sleep-reading through stuff like this in your haste to get to the end. Which is, I think, just the desired effect. According to recent research done by neuro-linguists at the universities of Birmingham, London and Warwick (I read the report in the Guardian), it is "the release of . . . neurological opiates [that] makes Christie's writing literally unputdownable." But there's more to it than this. Christie's narrative speed (short words, short sentences, plenty of dashes, a limited vocabulary, lots of dialogue), use of familiar, clichéd phrases (that apparently trigger the release of serotonin and endorophins, making us all happy readers), and "minimum cognitive distraction" (that is, her lack of Flaubertian detail) is not only addictive but narcotic. Which makes it a sort of writing uniquely suited for mystery writing in that in encourages you not to use your brain. All you as a reader have to do is keep turning the pages.

Not that fighting the effects of the drug and paying close attention to the text is going to help you very much. Does Christie always play fair with the reader? Even given that this book is a kind of fantasy along the lines of And Then There Were None (with which it shares the doctrine of just murder), I have to say I find the unraveling of the conspiracy to be a bit much. How are we to believe the way Poirot draws all the connections between the different passengers and the Armstrong case? Get a load of this bit of deduction/inspired guesswork as he reveals the true identity of the Countess:

  "What do you think her connection with the Armstrong family can be? She has never been in America, she says."
  "Exactly, and she speaks English with a foreign accent, and she has a foreign appearance which she exaggerates. But it should not be difficult to guess who she is. I mentioned just now the name of Mrs. Armstrong's mother. It was 'Linda Arden,' and she was a very celebrated actress - among other things a Shakespearean actress. Think of As You Like It, with the Forest of Arden and Rosalind. It was there she got the inspiration for her acting name. 'Linda Arden,' the name by which she was known all over the world, was not her real name. It may have been Goldenberg; it is quite likely that she had Central European blood in her veins - a strain of Jewish, perhaps. Many nationalities drift to America. I suggest to you, gentlemen, that the young sister of Mrs. Armstrong's, little more than a child at the time of the tragedy, was Helena Goldenberg, the younger daughter of Linda Arden, and that she married Count Andrenyi when he was an attaché in Washington."

What a performance! Now granted this is a strategy typical of Christie in that it offers a solution to the puzzle that is itself a kind of red herring. Poirot's solutions are rarely the same as the reader's. But still: "It may have been Goldenberg; it is quite likely that she had Central European blood in her veins" - all of which is speculation without a shred of proof, or so much as a hint to the reader as to what's coming. And a lot of it is like this. To take just one other example (out of many): When M. Bouc compliment's Poirot on his "miraculous guess" that Mary Debenham was the Armstrong governess he insists that it "was not a guess" and that the Countess had "practically told" him. How so? Because when the Countess described the governess she described someone the total opposite of Mary Debenham. This means she must have been covering for Mary. And what's more, Poirot has no trouble following her "unconscious association of ideas" to the made-up name she gives the governess: Freebody.

  "Eh bien, you may  not know it, but there is a shop in London that was called until recently Debenham & Freebody. With the name Debenham running in her head, the Countess clutches at another name quickly, and the first that comes is Freebody. Naturally, I understood immediately."

Naturally. 

But then, Poirot is an artist, and he's good at making stuff like this up.

We might divide fictional detectives into two schools. In the first place we have someone like Poe's C. Auguste Dupin, who doesn't even have to leave his room to solve the case. He can simply sit in the dark and imagine the mind of the criminal (like Poirot imagining the Countess's unconscious association of ideas). While the clods from the Parisian police rip the Minister's room apart looking for the purloined letter, all Dupin has to do is think about where the Minister was likely to have put it. The other type of detective is exemplified by Sherlock Holmes. He's just as smart as Dupin, but he's more of a hunter-gatherer. He needs clues. The mystery for him is a kind of jig-saw puzzle where all the pieces have to be gathered together and then assembled in just the right way before he can walk us through the Musgrave ritual. For a Dupin-style detective a mystery is more like one of those pictures you have to stare at until you see the hidden image.

Poirot has more in common with Dupin. As he explains to the train doctor, he is "not one to rely upon the expert procedure. It is the psychology I seek, not the fingerprint or the cigarette ash." One can imagine Holmes rolling his eyes. And one can also see why this book doesn't play fair. You see, detectives like Holmes are surrogates for the reader, uncovering the mystery as they go along. Poirot, at least in this book, isn't that kind of a detective. He is a surrogate for the author.

It his friend M. Bouc who wishes he had "the pen of Balzac" to depict the scene on board the train. All these people of different nationalities and different classes, all "strangers to one another," brought together under one roof . . . it "lends itself to romance." And yet, Poirot supposes, more the mystery writer than a Balzac, what if there were an "accident?"

  "Ah, no, my friend - "
  "From your point of view it would be regrettable, I agree. But nevertheless let us just for one moment suppose it. Then, perhaps, all these here are linked together - by death."

And indeed they will be linked together by this most "theatrical kind of crime." Most of Christie's mysteries (at least the ones I've read) are highly theatrical. Only usually it is the killer who is imagined as a kind of too-clever-by-half author, like the Judge in And Then There Were None, or the narrator in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. In this story it's important that there is an artist, an actor, to play "the most important part in the drama" (that of Mrs. Hubbard), but I can't lose the feeling that it's really Poirot who is the stage manager - a feeling reinforced by the weird ending, where everyone agrees that what really happened was just one of Poirot's theories.

Murder on the Orient Express is a classic mystery that despite its odd singularity also manages to be broad enough to admit many different interpretations. It can be all things to all people. You can read it as a meta-novel, a fairy tale, a literary stunt, or a moral essay - and all at the same time. While working on this review I happened to be reading A. N. Wilson's After the Victorians. He has a brief discussion of Murder on the Orient  Express where he talks about how Christie's "elemental simplicities" account for the survival of so much of her work. The case in point: A "very simple revenge story" that "nevertheless simmers with import":

The wrong which has been accomplished by the American, and which has to be avenged as they all pass through the Balkans by a multicultural and multinational group of individuals - what does it suggest? Not an allegory, of course, but can we quite dismiss the thought that the league of nationalities wishes to put its multifarious stab-wounds into the heart of the man who has brought disaster on them all? Are they the League of Nations taking revenge, in the very area of the world where their troubles began - the Balkans - upon the old gentleman, President Wilson, who . . . No, that is too neat an 'explanation.' But appealing to more than the human desire to solve a puzzle; or, to put it another way, the need to solve a puzzle, by the very fact of its being so obsessively important to so many crossword and mystery addicts, would appear to be something which goes deeper than its surface attractions.

No, it doesn't really work as an allegory, or an explanation, but the story does provoke this kind of reading. When the conductor informs Poirot before boarding that "All the world travels tonight" it has a Conrad-like resonance, hinting at these kind of larger meanings. At the same time, what he says has a crude, obvious quality (like the "typical Italian") that makes us want to dismiss it entirely.

So is this book great literature? It's a great mystery novel, but it never colours outside the lines. It's a great story, but a story whose power seems almost independent of its expression, which is undistinguished. Yes there's more going on than appears at first glance, but Christie's gifts, in particular her ability to play bad writing to her advantage, still strike me as being mostly instinctual. Indeed, given her work habits ("I find no reason why one month isn't adequate time to write a book"), it's hard to imagine otherwise.

In other words, it's a classic of pop fiction. And the curse of it is, if it was anything more it wouldn't be as good.

BACK