Murder on the Orient Express

The Most Famous Train Journey Never Taken

On the second night out of Istanbul the Simplon Orient Express runs into a snowdrift and stops. By morning one of the passengers is dead in a locked compartment, stabbed twelve times, and the only people who could have reached him are the twelve strangers sharing the coach. It is one of the most elegant set-ups in detective fiction, and a great deal of it was borrowed from things that had actually happened.

Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express at the height of her powers, and the choice of setting was not incidental. She knew the train. She had travelled on it alone in 1928, on the first foreign journey she ever made without company, and she went on using it for years afterwards to reach the archaeological digs in Iraq and Syria where her second husband, Max Mallowan, was working. The dining car, the narrow corridor, the folding washbasin, the conductor's seat at the end of the coach — she was writing about a place she had lived in.

The story appeared first as a serial in the American Saturday Evening Post during 1933, under the title Murder in the Calais Coach. The novel followed in Britain on 1 January 1934, published by the Collins Crime Club, and in the United States on 28 February that year, where the serial title was retained. The usual explanation for the American change is Graham Greene: his Stamboul Train had been published in the States two years earlier as Orient Express, and one Orient Express on the shelves was enough.

Night in a Historic Twin cabin on today's Venice Simplon-Orient-Express — the corridor, the lamp and the folding berths Christie described

The Real Events Behind the Story

The Train That Stopped in the Snow

In the winter of 1929 a blizzard closed on the Orient Express roughly fifty miles short of Istanbul, near the town of Çerkezköy in Turkish Thrace, and buried it. There were about twenty passengers on board — diplomats, businessmen and their wives, a couple of priests — and they were not going anywhere. The steam heating failed. The lighting ran down. Meals were reduced to a single ration a day and then to whatever could be bought from a nearby village, whose inhabitants were at first unwilling to sell anything at all and were eventually persuaded by money.

What lifted the incident out of the ordinary was that the passengers dug themselves out. Volunteers tunnelled through drifts that had frozen hard. The tunnel collapsed on them more than once and had to be shored up with timber and fittings stripped from the train, but they broke through in the end and crew members reached a village. Turkish soldiers arrived with sleighs and supplies, and word that a snowplough was coming. Six days after it had stopped, the train moved again. The story was reported around the world, and Christie — who was herself held up by weather on the same line in 1931 — had her snowdrift.

The Kidnapping That Shaped the Plot

The second borrowing is darker and much closer to the surface of the book. In March 1932 the twenty-month-old son of Charles Lindbergh, the most famous aviator alive, was taken from his nursery in New Jersey. A ransom was paid. The child was found dead. The case dominated the American press for years, and its damage spread well beyond the family: a maid in the household of Anne Lindbergh's mother, questioned repeatedly and never charged, took her own life while under suspicion.

Christie moved all of it wholesale into the fictional Armstrong family — a kidnapped child, a ransom paid for nothing, a mother who does not survive the shock, a father who does not survive the aftermath, and a nursemaid wrongly suspected who dies before she can be cleared. Every passenger in the Calais coach turns out to be connected to that household. The novel's real subject is not who killed the man in compartment number two. It is whether a jury of the bereaved is entitled to reach a verdict the law never delivered.

Where Christie Actually Wrote It

The Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul keeps Room 411 as the Agatha Christie Room, complete with period furniture and a replica typewriter, and its claim that the novel was written there is repeated everywhere. It has never been documented. The Christie estate's own account points instead to Arpachiyah in northern Iraq, where she spent the 1933 season on Mallowan's dig and where the manuscript was most likely drafted. The Pera Palace is a wonderful hotel and worth a night on any Istanbul itinerary; the story about Room 411 is best enjoyed as a story.

The Real Orient Express

The train Christie put her passengers on was a genuine service, not an invention. The original Orient Express left Paris Gare de l'Est for the first time on 4 October 1883, operated by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, and ran east towards Constantinople. After the Simplon Tunnel opened through the Alps, a southern variant was introduced: the Simplon Orient Express, running Paris – Lausanne – Milan – Venice – Belgrade – Sofia – Istanbul. That is the train in the novel, and Vinkovci and Brod — the stations either side of Poirot's snowdrift — are real places on that line, in what was then Yugoslavia and is now Croatia.

The Orient Express as it appeared in 1883, on the inaugural run from Paris Gare de l'Est

The Carriages That Survived

By the 1970s the great Wagons-Lits sleeping cars had been scattered across Europe, some in service on other railways, some standing derelict, at least one in use as a summer house. From 1977 the American entrepreneur James Sherwood began buying them back, one carriage at a time, and putting them through a restoration that took years and drew in marquetry specialists and the glassmakers at Lalique. The rebuilt train ran again in 1982 as the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, and it is still running.

• Sleeping Car 3309 (1926, Belgium) — marooned in the 1929 snowdrift; today a Grand Suite
• Sleeping Car 3425 (1929, England) — said to have carried King Carol II out of Romania in 1940; today a Grand Suite
• Bar Car 3674 (1931, France) — the piano bar where the evening goes on long after dinner
• Restaurant Car 4141 (1929) — interior glass panels by René Lalique
• Restaurant Cars 4095 and 4110 (1927 and 1926, Birmingham) — still serving lunch and dinner daily

On Screen

1974 — Sidney Lumet

The adaptation most people mean, and the one Christie herself was said to be happiest with. Albert Finney played Poirot inside a cast that included Sean Connery, Lauren Bacall, John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael York, Jacqueline Bisset and Ingrid Bergman, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress; the film took six nominations in all. Interiors were built at Elstree, and the running shots were filmed on a closed line in the French Jura between Pontarlier and Gilley. Christie attended the premiere in London. It was her last public appearance.

2010 — David Suchet

The darkest version. Made for ITV's long-running Poirot series, it strips out the glamour and plays the ending as something close to a crisis of faith for a detective who has spent a career insisting the law is not negotiable.

2017 — Kenneth Branagh

Branagh directed and starred, opposite Judi Dench, Michelle Pfeiffer, Willem Dafoe, Penélope Cruz, Daisy Ridley and Johnny Depp. The production briefly considered filming aboard a real train and gave up on it, then built two working replica rakes and a thirty-tonne locomotive at Longcross Studios outside London, along with a Stamboul station, a viaduct, and a mountainside thirty-five feet high running several hundred metres inside the building. Alpine plates shot in New Zealand were dropped in beyond the carriage windows. A stage adaptation by Ken Ludwig appeared the same year and is still touring.

Travelling the Route Today

You cannot book Poirot's exact journey — the through service from Istanbul to Calais ended long ago — but you can travel almost every part of it on the surviving carriages. The classic Paris to Venice run leaves in the late afternoon, crosses the Alps overnight and arrives the following afternoon — about twenty-five hours from platform to lagoon, and the journey most people mean when they say they want to do the Orient Express. Twice a year the train makes the full original expedition to Istanbul over five nights, leaving from Gare de l'Est exactly as the first Orient Express did in 1883. And the eastern routes to Vienna, Budapest and Prague follow much of the line the Simplon service used.

A Murder Mystery of Your Own

The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express does not stage murder mysteries; the continental train takes itself rather more seriously than that. Belmond runs them instead on the British Pullman, the UK day train, on circular trips out of London Victoria. The case is set in 1933 — the year Christie's story was first serialised — and it plays out around you across a five-course lunch with champagne, with the actors working the carriages between courses and the passengers expected to reach a verdict before the train gets back. It costs a small fraction of a European journey, and the Pullman cars themselves are near-contemporaries of the Wagons-Lits sleepers. For the Christie reader in the family it is close to the perfect present. Call us for current dates and fares.

The cast assembling at London Victoria before a Murder Mystery Lunch on the Belmond British Pullman

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