Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
A luxury train ride, cursed jewels, beautiful rich people, and a murder? Sign me up for the ride! Every time I feel like I am really struggling to finish a long book, a good old Agatha Christie mystery is always able to jolt me from ennui (it’s my new favourite word thanks to “Inside Out 2”).
“The Mystery of the Blue Train” is a Hercule Poirot thriller, and the plot is centered around a young rich woman’s murder on a train from London to the French Riviera. Looking to divorce her good-for-nothing husband, Ruth Kettering, daughter of an American billionaire, was on her way to meet her lover, but she is found dead on the train. Missing from her person is a case that held a legendary ruby called “The Heart of Fire,” which was a gift from her daddy dearest, once worn by the Empress of Russia. Ruth, like most rich kids, was open to taking precious gifts from her dad, but not valuable advice like “dump your handsome loser lover, he is only after our money.”
So, the prime suspects in Ruth’s murder are her lover Comte de la Roche and her embittered husband Derek Kettering, who would’ve lost everything if their divorce was finalized. The only reliable witness in the case is Katherine Grey, a 33-year-old woman who was on the same train to meet some far-off relatives. And in a cute coincidence, retired world-famous detective Hercule Poirot was also on the same train, and he takes an instant liking to Ms. Grey, and the two try to solve the murder mystery together. Retirement doesn’t mean anything to a former detective if an intriguing murder and robbery occur right in their alley. If you saw the 2023 thriller movie “A Haunting in Venice”, you’d remember Hercule Poirot was coaxed out of his retirement to investigate a very curios case.
“The Mystery of the Blue Train” is set in the 1920s and is international in flavor, with characters of different nationalities interacting with each other, and Christie generously leaning in on the stereotypes attached to each country in jest. The Americans are rich, shrewd (not poor Ruth), the Greeks are connoisseurs of finer things in life, the Russians dabble in shady business, while the French get representation through a meticulous police, and the British of-course are prim and proper.
Apart from the friendly genius Hercule Poirot, the only likable character in “The Mystery of the Blue Train” is the humble, intelligent Katherine Grey, who doesn’t have any direct connection to the murder case but finds herself in the thick of things. And to spice things up in the novel, Katherine also gets herself not one, but two new potential suitors as soon as she arrives in France. Both men are poles apart from each other, and in a surprising turn of events, she is portrayed to have a soft spot for both of them, which didn’t seem believable, and Christie probably added the romance for some heightened drama.
“Katherine Grey was born with the power of managing old ladies, dogs, and small boys, and she did it without any apparent sense of strain. At twenty-three she had been a quiet girl with beautiful eyes. At thirty-three she was a quiet woman, with those same grey eyes, shining steadily out on the world with a kind of happy serenity that nothing could shake.” This is how the author chooses to describe Katherine. A young hard-working woman with a sensible head about her.
All the prime murder suspects in the book (and there are more than two) are good-looking charming people, and like always – Agatha Christie keeps dropping red herrings to keep readers confused over who the real culprit is. Is the jilted husband Derek Kettering, the greedy Casanova Comte de La Roche, or someone else completely, who had their eyes on the “The Heart of Fire”, a ruby worth millions of dollars. A lot of people would’ve liked to get their hands on the ruby, so there’s plenty of reasons to suspect almost everybody in the novel. For no real reason, except to thrill fans of the supernatural genre, the author also adds just a dash of spookiness in the novel – a tiny little incident that occurs with a character, who imagines having seen the victim’s ghost trying to tell them who their killer is.
In the end, “The Mystery of the Blue Trains” turns out to be a twisty novel, with Hercule Poirot coming up with facts that were simply not available to the reader before. Although, the murderer doesn’t come as a complete surprise and the author does do some foreshadowing in the last few chapters, there’s enough interesting details in the end to make it feel like a satisfactory conclusion. If you haven’t read this one and are an Agatha Christie fan, it’s worth a read on the weekend.
Rating: 3.5 on 5.
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