The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie

In Agatha Christie’s 1928 classic “The Mystery of the Blue Train,” her legendary detective Hercule Poirot finds himself embroiled in a deliciously complex case of jealousy, greed, and cold-blooded murder aboard the luxury trans-continental rail service. When an opulent ride through France goes lethally awry for a heartless millionaire heiress fleeing England to rendezvous with her lover, Poirot’s “little gray cells” are taxed to their limits in identifying the culprit among an assortment of sketchy suspects with more than enough motive for the crime.

The Setup:

As her sixth novel featuring the brilliant Belgian sleuth, “The Mystery of the Blue Train” represents an early stylistic model for the sort of intricately-plotted mysteries that would cement Christie’s reputation as a master of classic whodunits. Already, we see many of her signature elements fully formed – an iconic setting combining the opulence of luxury travel with a distinctly menacing undertone, the memorable introduction of eccentric suspects with their own shady secrets, and most importantly, Poirot himself as the deceptively fussy genius whose deductive reasoning skills prove utterly unparalleled.

The tale kicks off in typically audacious Christie fashion, with the cruel, vain millionaire Ruth Kettering eagerly preparing to abscond from Britain to the sun-kissed French Riviera for a romantic tryst. Over her wealthy industrialist father’s strenuous objections, Ruth plans to escape on the famed Blue Train, that sleek modern marvel whisking Europe’s ultra-elite across borders in stylish splendor. And in a brazen slight to her disapproving patriarch, Ruth takes her new priceless ruby necklace along for the train voyage instead of storing it in the bank per his wishes.

That very first night aboard the trans-continental conveyance, Ruth’s selfishness finally catches up to her in grisly fashion. Her lifeless body is discovered in her luxury cabin compartment, strangled, with her precious rubies conspicuously missing. Worse, all signs point to the killer being either Ruth’s meek-mannered husband in pursuit seeking divorce or the roguish Count she planned to abscond with as her Latin lover. With two likely culprits and an array of shady witnesses all trapped on the same mobile crime scene, the Blue Train has suddenly transformed into a powder keg primed for explosive disaster.

The Tangled Plot:

Enter Hercule Poirot, Christie’s quirky yet brilliant Belgian detective. As if by grand compositional design, Poirot just happens to also be vacationing aboard the Blue Train’s first-class carriages as the deadly crime unfolds. Though notionally on holiday, his sensitive nose for injustice is instantly enflamed, and he commits himself to assisting the French authorities in identifying Ruth’s killer from the compromised ranks of passengers and crew.

From there, Christie spins a tantalizing web of clues, deceptions, and potential motives that will keep even her most ardent fans perpetually scratching their heads. Just when we feel we have a comfortable handle on Ruth’s murderer, new revelations surface to pull the rose-colored rug from beneath our feet. Backroom business machinations, lovers’ indiscretions, and illicit gambling debts all emerge to cloud the crime scene in a murky haze of ambiguity and misdirection.

For all its early trappings as a rather straightforward crime of passion, “The Mystery of the Blue Train” spirals into a dizzying Rubik’s cube of human foibles where virtually every character—from the snooty English aristocrats to the compartment attendants suspiciously in debt—has skeletons in their closet and ample reason to do away with Ruth. As with the best of Christie, we’re drawn ever deeper into the intoxicating atmosphere of decadence and sin underlying her British Isles settings, a delicious contrast with the cozy pastoral trappings that first greet our eyes.

The Inimitable Poirot:

At the center of this beautifully-rendered cyclone of mystery sits the diminutive yet formidable Hercule Poirot. Already in this sixth installment, Christie has the character’s mannerisms and worldview firmly established as a standard for all the whodunits to come. His fussy precisionism about having two eggs each morning, his almost fetishistic appreciation for symmetry and neatness, his amusingly grandiloquent yet insightful observations about the human psyche—all these Poirot-isms are delivered with enough consistency and verve to cement him as an iconic character for the ages.

More importantly, Hercule Poirot’s unique deductive mind remains an utter joy to witness in action. Christie endows him with the wonderful dichotomy of being physically unassuming and occasionally comedic while simultaneously possessing an eerily penetrating super-intelligence that can pluck obscure yet damning details from the ether. When the dense plot threatens to overwhelm us, Hercule Poirot inevitably cuts through the mental clutter by homing in on seemingly trivial behaviors, inadvertent slips of the tongue, or “glaringly obvious” oversights that shift the entire case on its head.

It’s a literary magic trick that Christie deploys masterfully time and again, lulling us into a false sense of deductive security before walloping us with a mental U-turn only a genius like Hercule Poirot could have possibly foreseen. The sheer volume of potential solutions she anticipates and painstakingly dismantles over the course of the novel induces a sort of delightful whiplash that has us shaking our heads in admiration as much as bewildered frustration. As the pages turn, Hercule Poirot’s brilliance only grows in our estimation.

Thematic Resonance:

Beyond the expertly engineered mystery thrills, “The Mystery of the Blue Train” also works on a deeper psychological level in its characterizations of the suspects and the decadent milieu it depicts. Christie had a gift for revealing the true depths of human pettiness, greed, and cruel indifference flourishing beneath a veneer of aristocratic social graces. Her character portraits of the odious Ruth and her lascivious hangers-on create a vivid panorama of how easily morals and scruples could decay unchecked among the idle gentry with too much money and not enough conscience.

That the murder itself stems from Ruth’s careless flaunting of privilege and flouting of social expectations rings sadly, horrifyingly true. We see traces of Patricia Highsmith‘s depraved psychological portraiture in the way Christie lingers on Ruth’s selfish sense of entitlement to sew dysfunction in the name of her own material whims. Despite her evident talents and wealth, there remains a disturbingly hollow void at Ruth’s core, one that makes her ultimate demise seem surprisingly poetic in the greater societal context Christie presents.

In this light, Agatha Poirot emerges as a necessary moral compass stabilizing the proceedings, his comically idiosyncratic personal code never wavering even as corruption and vice swirl all around him. It’s a contrast that makes this already ingeniously-constructed mystery linger in the mind long after its thrilling final reveal.

The Verdict:

Is The Mystery of the Blue Train a minor miracle of plotting and characterization for its era? An unassailable masterpiece that already establishes Agatha Christie among the upper creative echelon of great 20th-century writers, mystery or otherwise? The answer is a ressounding…oui.

With her technical craftsmanship, clever misdirects, vivid sense of time and place, and keen sociological insights all firmly in evidence, this relatively early entry in the Agatha Christie canon checks all the boxes for supreme mystery entertainment. Yet it’s the emergence of Hercule Poirot in his full iconic glory that truly distinguishes this work. Here we have the roots of why he became such an indelible character, a brilliant comedic rendering of neuroticism and vanity that conceals a deductive mind of near-preternatural perception and logic.

While murder mysteries from this period often feel musty and dated, Agatha Christie makes “The Mystery of the Blue Train” an atmospheric time capsule still crackling with tension and electric wit. You can practically smell the smoke from the train engine hovering on the tracks as Poirot untangles an ever-expanding web of deception and double-crosses, all stemming from one loathsome woman’s cruel negligence. It’s a pitch-perfect combination of taut mystery plotting, memorable characterizations, and sly social commentary that still delights and satisfies today.

That said, Agatha Christie aficionados and newcomers alike can agree that “The Mystery of the Blue Train” remains one of her most tightly-constructed and purely entertaining cases. It’s the sort of cozy whodunit that reminds you why the Agatha Christie brand remains a byword for ingeniously-constructed clockwork storytelling married to devious morality plays. While later cases like Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express may be more famous, this 1928 gem remains an essential part of the Christie canon and a paradigm of why her mastery of mystery plotting has yet to be surpassed nearly a century later. All aboard!