1934: Murder on the Orient Express / Murder in the Calais Coach

Publisher: William Collins & Sons, 1934 (UK); Dodd, Mead & Co, 1934 (US)

Series: Hercule Poirot

Category: Novel

Cross refs: The Thirteen Problems

Warning, spoilers!

Murder on the Orient Express was the first Agatha Christie story I ever encountered and, as such, it retains a special place for me within the canon. It was actually via the 1974 film, starring Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot, that I originally discovered the wizardry of those little grey cells. My parents had the film on VHS, and I remember watching it over and over again. On reading the book years later, I was pleased to see how close that adaptation had been to its original (something increasingly rare), with only a few minor name changes and some dramatic newspaper spinning at the opening to set them apart.   

What I had not realised until more recently was that the murder of ‘little Daisy Armstrong’, which sits at the centre of the Orient Express case, was in fact based on the tragic, true story of the kidnapping and murder of the baby of celebrated aviators Charles Lindbergh (1902–1974) and Anne Spencer Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001). On 1 March 1932, one-year-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr was kidnapped from the family home in New Jersey. A ransom note demanding $50,000 was found at the scene. Twelve days later the body of a child was discovered just six miles away. As in the case of Daisy Armstrong, an innocent maid employed by the Lindbergh’s was suspected of being complicit in the crime and as a result of her presumed guilt she died by suicide.[1] Following the affair, the Lindberghs left the US for England, where they lived for a time in Long Barn, Kent, the property of the author Vita Sackville-West.

Christie’s own adventures on the Orient Express also fed into the narrative. Her first journey on the train was in 1928, at a turning point in her life following her divorce from Archie. Having not previously wanted to do things by herself (‘and I didn’t much want to now’[2]), when the opportunity to travel to the Middle East arose, she took a ‘now or never’ attitude:

All my life I had wanted to go on the Orient Express. When I had travelled to France or Spain or Italy, the Orient Express had often been standing at Calais, and I had longed to climb up into it.[3]

The journey was a success, becoming the first of many, though in her autobiography Christie warned: ‘Not until you travel by yourself do you realise how much the outside world will protect and befriend you – not always quite to one’s satisfaction.’[4] Still, her overbearing travel companions also served as narrative fodder.

On a subsequent trip, in 1931, the train was halted in the middle of the night due to flooding on the track. Later, the rain turned to snow, resulting in a two-day delay to the journey. In a letter to her husband, Max Mallowan, Christie described the events, as well as several passengers on the train, all of which offered ample inspiration for this novel:

My darling, what a journey! Started out from Istanbul in a violent thunder storm. We went very slowly during the night and about 3 AM stopped altogether …  A chatty breakfast in the dining car ensued. ‘All boys together’ spirit! There was an elderly American lady … a funny little Englishman from Smyrna … an old gentleman of 85 with a most amusing wife of 70 with a hideous but very attractive face … they were some of the richest people in Istanbul … Sitting with them was a Hungarian Minister and his wife … There were also two Danish lady missionaries ... The American lady … wept bitterly. ‘My daughter said I’d have no trouble at all … I’ve never travelled in Europe before and I’ll never travel in it again … A peaceful night except for the Turk who was next door to me and was continuously trying to open the door between our compartments – not, let us hope, for the worst reasons but I think because he thought it was the wash place!![5]

Christie’s experience of travelling on the Orient Express also allowed her to finesse the details in the book, with the timings for the train stops in the story correlating with the published timetable. She even took a further trip on the train once the book was written to ‘see where all the switches were’.[6] 

The Orient Express itself, a passenger train synonymous with luxury travel, was created in 1883 by the Belgian company Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (CIWL) – hence the ‘Wagon-Lit conductor’. Its inaugural journey – from Paris to Vienna – was on 5 June 1883, and the route was later extended to Istanbul (‘Stamboul’). Various further alterations and expansions to the route saw the introduction of the Simplon Orient Express, which followed the opening of the Simplon Tunnel, connecting Switzerland and Italy, in 1919. It was on the Simplon Orient Express that Christie’s murder took place. Given the romantic and luxurious atmosphere evoked just by its name, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Orient Express has featured heavily in literature across the ages, including in another favourite of mine, Gentleman Prefer Blondes (1925), as well as in my daughter’s new favourite series ‘Murder Most Unladylike’, First Class Murder (2015).  

What is interesting about Murder on the Orient Express is that it has the most un-Poirot-like resolution. For a man who repeatedly denounces murder, and who stands unflinchingly on the side of justice, it seems strange that he should allow the killers of Ratchett/Cassetti to go free. Was it because the horror of the murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr. was so fresh in the public imagination that Christie felt some higher justice was required? Did the 12 figures on the train represent a vigilante jury? As Poirot observed:

I remembered a remark of Colonel Arbuthnot’s about trial by jury. A jury is composed of twelve people – there were twelve passengers – Ratchett was stabbed twelve times … Ratchett had escaped justice in America. There was no question as to his guilt. I visualised a self-appointed jury of twelve people who had condemned him to death and who by the exigencies of the case had themselves been forced to be his executioners. And immediately, on that assumption, the whole case fell into beautiful shining order.

Perhaps, as with The Thirteen Problems, we also need to look back at Christie’s personal attitude towards the protection of innocence to answer this question. In her autobiography she wrote:

I can suspend judgement on those who kill – but I think they are evil for the community; they bring in nothing except hate and take all they can. I am willing to believe that they are made that way … for which, perhaps one should pity them; but even then I think, not spare them – because you cannot spare them … The innocent must be protected; they must be able to live at peace …[7]

[1] Dennis Sanders and Len Lovallo, The Agatha Christie Companion (New York, NY: Delacorte Press, 1984), pp. 105–8.

[2] Christie 2011, p. 361.

[3] Christie 2011, p. 361.

[4] Christie 2011, p. 365.

[5] See ‘Christie’s Travels on the Orient Express’, The Home of Agatha Christie, 3 October 2017,   https://www.agathachristie.com/news/2017/christies-travels-on-the-orient-express [accessed 28 September 2026]; ‘Murder on the Orient Express’, Poirot Score, n.d., https://poirotscore.com/portfolio/poirot-score-95/ [accessed 13 May 2026].

[6] Quoted in Worsley 2022, p. 214.

[7] Christie 2011, p. 438.