Book Review : Hercule Poirot book 6 The Mystery of Blue Train

Original Language: English
Publisher: William Collins & Sons
Country: Great Britain
Publication Date: 1928
Page Count: 296

My rating

Blurb

Le Train Bleu is an elegant, leisurely means of travel, and one certainly free of intrigue. Hercule Poirot is aboard, bound for the Riviera. And so is Ruth Kettering, the American heiress. Bailing out of a doomed marriage, she is en route to reconcile with her former lover. But her private affairs are made quite public when she is found murdered in her luxury compartment -- bludgeoned almost beyond recognition. Fans of later novel Murder on the Orient Express will not want to miss this journey by rail -- and Poirot's eerie reenactment of the scene.

My thought

Poirot boards Le Train Bleu, bound for the French Riviera. So does Katherine Grey, who is having her first winter out of England, after having inherited a huge sum in a most romantic manner. While on board she meets Ruth Kettering, an American heiress bailing out from a marriage to meet her lover. The next morning, though, Ruth is found dead in her compartment, a victim of strangulation. The theft of her priceless rubies, and rumors of a strange man loitering near her compartment, send Poirot on a quest to find her murderer.

This was one of the first of her novels where I genuinely felt emotion for the murdered woman. You get to know her in the first third of the book, so when she's found dead it's a little hard to switch to the typical cozy Christie feel. Otherwise though it's an engaging story; she does much better writing about typical mysteries than when she tries to create an espionage thriller. So not one of her best, but a good one nonetheless.

The novel's plot is based on the 1923 Poirot short story The Plymouth Express (much later collected in book form in the US in 1951 in The Under Dog and Other Stories and in the UK in 1974 in Poirot's Early Cases).

This novel features the first description of the fictional village of St. Mary Mead, which would later be the home of Christie's detective Miss Marple. This, however, Miss Anne Hart, in her 'biography' of Miss Marple, assures us, is not the same.It also features the first appearance of the minor recurring character of Mr Goby who would later appear in both After the Funeral and Third Girl.

 The first two chapters of this book were exceptionally interesting, as they made me think of so many spy-thriller movies that I've seen. By the end of the book, Christie has tied together all the seemingly unconnected threads of this story to create quite a nice read

Agatha Christie stated in her biography that she wasn't proud of this book, but I liked it. It was much better than her previous Hercule Poirot novel, THE BIG FOUR.