The Mystery of the Blue Train / Agatha Christie

 

The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I can see why Christie disliked this book. It is overly convoluted, with too many moving parts, and in several respects it doesn't make any sense. Judging from her account in her autobiography, she was in a highly distracted state when she wrote it. But she needed the income, so off to the publisher it went.

Christie is still playing around with international crime syndicates and costly jewels in this Poirot adventure. More on the thriller side of the street, although there is the mystery aspect for Poirot to solve. In the early pages of the novel, when we learned that Ruth Kettering was a redhead, I waited for Captain Hastings to show up to admire her! I was so disappointed when he never arrived on the scene.

Christie's female characters have a pronounced predilection for bad boys. In that, this novel is consistent with The Man in the Brown Suit and The Secret of Chimneys. Even Poirot seems to intimate that this is the way of the world. I found myself very disappointed in Katherine, even though Christie arranged things to ensure that she chose the less criminal of the rascals provided for her to choose from.

Really, I thought that the real murderer should have been Mirielle, Derek Kettering's mistress. She was the first to suggest that Ruth's death would solve all his problems, we know she was on the train, that she considered herself pragmatic rather than swayed by emotions, that ironically she had a violent temper, and that she did seem to want to keep Derek as a lover. Alas,  Christie did not use this very logical strategy, but chose a more convoluted path.

You can't win them all and not every book that an author produces can be masterful. Books like this one prove Agatha Christie was not exempt from human foibles.


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