Anyone who has read the short story ‘The Plymouth Express’ would be forgiven for having a sense of déjà vu when embarking on The Mystery of the Blue Train.

There is a reason that Agatha Christie is celebrated for her country-house murder mysteries and not for her international espionage thrillers. While the former show her strength and originality as a writer, the latter can’t help but feel slightly derivative and, at times, a little absurd.

Christie’s forte is creating a web of intrigue on the domestic scale. Here her skills of observation, her ‘wonderful psychological insight into human nature’ (another quote from the present book) come to the fore.

Here we again enjoy the almost absurd success of various elaborate disguises: an imposter posing as the Prime Minister; a woman doubling as her own maid; a man living a double life as businessman and petty thief, his own wife seemingly unaware of the false beard he is sporting.

The Murder on the Links contains a number of features that were to become Christie tropes – the watch with the broken face; the use of disguises; and the desire of a murderer to repeat their crime.

Awash with red herrings and a cornucopia of clues, this book acts as a form of ‘preface’ to the stories that were to follow, introducing the reader to those elements that would become quintessentially Christie.