LITMIR.BIZ

      The Mystery of the Blue Train was written at the lowest point in Christie’s life. In An Autobiography she writes, ‘Really, how that wretched book came to be written I don’t know.’ Following her disappearance and her subsequent separation from Archie Christie, she went to Tenerife with her daughter Rosalind and her secretary, Carlo Fisher, to finish the already started book, the writing of which also represented an important milestone. She now realised that her status had advanced from amateur to professional: ‘I was driven desperately on by the desire, indeed the necessity, to write another book and make money. [But] I had no joy in writing, no élan. I had worked out the plot – a conventional plot, partly adapted from one of my other stories … I have always hated The Mystery of the Blue Train but I got it written and sent it off to the publishers. It sold just as well as my last book had done. So I had to content myself with that – though I cannot say I have ever been proud of it.’

      The short story to which she refers is ‘The Plymouth Express’, published in April 1923. A minor entry in the Poirot canon, it is doubtful that it merited expansion into a novel. Extra complications in the shape of the history of the Heart of Fire are added in the novel and the inclusion of a new character, Katherine Grey, is significant. Katherine lives in St Mary Mead, although she does not seem to know a certain Miss Jane Marple, who had made her detective debut some three months earlier in ‘The Tuesday Night Club’. A quiet, determined, sensible young woman seeing the world for the first time, Katherine is a sympathetic character who captivates Poirot.

      Notes for The Mystery of the Blue Train are in two Notebooks: Notebook 1 has a mere five pages but Notebook 54 has over eighty, although the entries on each page are relatively short. They all reflect accurately the finished novel; no variations are considered, nor are there any discarded ideas, possibly because it was an expansion of a short story. Notes begin with Chapter 4 and then, twenty pages later, we find a listing of the earlier chapters, suggesting that those notes had been destroyed.

      I include a dozen pages from towards the end of Notebook 54. They contain Poirot’s explanation of the crimes, a passage so close to the published version in Chapter 35 that it merits reproduction in full. Although the published version is more elaborate, nowhere else in the plotting of her books is there anything else like this. Flowing handwriting covers the pages, elucidating a complex plot with a minimum of deletion. Much of the following passage is almost exactly as Agatha Christie wrote it in Tenerife in 1927; I have added only punctuation. The single most concentrated example of continuous text in the Notebooks, it is an impressive example of Christie’s fluency, clarity and readability, all factors that play an important part in her continuing popularity.

      ‘Explanations? Mais oui, I will give them to you. It began with 1 point – the disfigured face, usually a question of identity; but not this time. The murdered woman was undoubtedly Ruth Kettering and I put it aside.’

      ‘When did you first begin to suspect the maid?’

      ‘I did not for some time – one trifling [point] – the note case – her mistress not on such terms as would make it likely – it awakened a doubt. She had only been with her mistress two months yet I could not connect her to the crime since she had been left behind in Paris. But once having a doubt I began to question that statement – how did we know? By the evidence of your secretary, Major Knighton, a completely outside and impartial testimony, and by the dead woman’s own confession testimony to the conductor. I put that latter point aside for the moment because a very curious idea was growing up in my mind. Instead, I concentrated on the first point – at first sight it seemed conclusive but it led me to consider Major Knighton and at once certain points occurred to me. To begin with he, also, had only been with you for a period of 2 months and his initial was also K. Supposing – just supposing – that it was his notecase. If Ada Mason and he were working together and she recognised it, would she not act precisely as she had done? At first taken aback, she quickly fell in with him gave herself time to think and then suggested a plausible explanation that fell in

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