Murder on the Orient Express - Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot #10)

One of the categories that I agonized over in my 2017 reading challenge was the one for a book becoming a movie this year--mainly because there weren't really any books becoming movies that a) I hadn't already read and b) I wanted to read.  I finally settled on the classic mystery Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie.  This is the tenth Hercule Poirot mystery, but you definitely don't have to have read the other ones in order to read it--I hadn't.  Hercule Poirot is basically an "any detective" of the Sherlock Holmes persuasion, solving crimes mostly by thinking about them and observing things rather than pounding the pavement, examining forensic evidence, etc.

Somehow, despite knowing what happens in all the Star Wars movies that have come out recently without having seen them, or knowing what happens in Game of Thrones without having read the books or seen the show, I've never known who the murderer is on the Orient Express, which now strikes me as somewhat strange.  But I knew it was a closed-circle mystery, which is a mystery in which the setting means that the detectives, suspects, witnesses, etc. are a limited pool that no one can join or leave because they are isolated by something--in this case, they are stuck on a train that is stranded in the mountains of Yugoslavia because it ran into a snow drift.  When a murder is discovered to have been committed, it's up to Hercule Poirot, who hopped the train to answer a summons in London, to find who the guilty party is.

This is a pretty quick read and the chapters are short, making it easy to pick up and put down.  I also think it's a good mystery because, while there is a twist, Christie puts in enough clues that you can figure it out, if you're paying attention and can maybe stretch your imagination a little.  In fact, this is one of the first mysteries where I started to think, "Wait a minute..." and while I didn't get everything exactly right, I was pretty darn close!  Considering how terrible I am at figuring out most mysteries, that made me pretty proud of myself, and I think it's also a testament to how good Christie was--after all, she wasn't the "Queen of Mystery" for no reason.  No matter how far-fetched the scenario got (and it gets very, very far-fetched) she seemed to make it work in a way that less-far-fetched plot twists in contemporary mysteries and thrillers don't seem to, purely because these more recent ones always have me going, "How did they figure that out?" whereas this made perfect sense.

Overall, very fun.  I can see why people enjoy Agatha Christie so much.  However, I'm not sure how this can be made into an interesting movie, being as it's mostly people sitting around and talking.  Maybe something a la 12 Angry Men?

4 stars out of 5.