Second paragraph of third chapter:

“Pleased to see you back again, Mr Van Aldin,” he said.”

Yeah, I’m working through the less celebrated novels of Agatha Christie (having read all the best known ones in 2013). This one dates from 1928, and features Poirot dragged into the investigation of a murder and jewel theft on Le Train Bleu, which used to run direct overnight from Calais via Paris to the French Riviera. (No point in such a route now that you can get from Paris to Nice in five hours by TGV, or a bit less by air.)

Some of this environment has become familiar to me as I work through my grandmother’s memoirs. The victim here is a rich young American woman moving between England and France (as was my grandmother), and there is another older rich woman living in the Riviera who ran a hospital during the Great War (as did my grandmother’s aunt). It’s also notable that all characters are expected to be fluent if not perfect in French.

Agatha Christie herself was reportedly dissatisfied with this book, and I can see some of the flaws that she possibly was conscious of, and some that she possibly was unaware of. There’s some gratuitous anti-semitism. She doesn’t have a good ear for names – “Van Aldin” doesn’t work for a New Yorker with Dutch ancestors; nor does “Papopolous” for a Greek, especially a Greek Jew. The actual murder plot is hilariously convoluted and Poirot’s solution to it is spun almost out of thin air.

But there’s one very well drawn character, Katherine Grey, who benefits from a recent inheritance and gets sucked into the mystery on her way to the Riviera – she reminded me a bit of Anne Beddingfeld in The Man in the Brown Suit, who heads off to Africa in similar circumstances, but a bit older and perhaps more rooted in reality. She is romantically pursued by The Wrong Chap but ends up with The Right Chap, to the frustration of the Teenage Girl – who herself is a standard Christie trope, done a bit better than usual here.

So it’s unusual for me to say this, but I think it actually works better as a Bildungsroman about Katherine than as a detective story. You can get The Mystery of the Blue Train here.

Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Death on the Nile | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party