The author of the book is the well known crime novelist Aagatha Christie, who was born September 1890 in England and died January 1976 with the age of 85 in England. Christie was specially known for being the first female crime novelist, who had had such a big success with her novels. In that time people used to say: ”Naah you can’t write good crime books, you’re a woman”, but she said ” Ooh just wait, I will show you”, and yes, she did show us. In her career she wrote 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections.
The book I read is called Murder on the orient express, which is one of her most known detective novels. There is a movie made of it too. Christie had her own style that she show in many of her books it is that the plot handles in one single place, for example, us in this book, in the train. So the characters are in that one location from the beginning till the end of the book. There happens a murder and among a lot of people and the detective, which is Hercule Poirot tries to find out who it was. The thought that they all stuck in one room makes the whole story very thrilling and I love it. Christie also uses the same characters again in other novels, so it is like a criminal series where all episodes show a new story. I like her stories very much but if you read the or watch the movies for them a lot I’ll get bored, because they, as I already mentioned, are very similar. ”And then there were none” and ”the mousetrap” have similarities to The orient express.
Detective Hercule Poirot is the main character, plus all the suspects for the murder, which means all of the people that are in the train. Everyone gets a profile including the name, motive, alibi and evidence against her/him or suspicious circumstances , which are shown in the book too. Hercule Poirot is in the train by chance, so in the beginning nobody knows he is a detective. After the murder happened he knew he can’t trust anybody, so he was quite quiet and always had an eye open for every possibility. The other characters were very mysterious that you couldn’t guess anything. You could see both, friendships and enemies between the suspects. All of them had their own personality nobody was alike, some were arrogant, others helpless or kind of weird. They came from different countries too such as France, Sweden, England, America, Hungary, Germany and Poirot was Belgian. That all makes the book exciting.
The book was first published 1931 so the language felt a bit old too and the way Christie was writing. It wasn’t the words she used, which made it feel old, more the way how she expressed things.The story was told by Poirot and his thoughts when he was trying to find the murderer.
I liked the the plot very much the book was a bit challenging to read for me, because it had a lot of boring parts in it and this is a really big problem for me because I can’t even read boring parts in Finnish without reading it again hundreds of times. Other things that dist annoyed me was the book cover. It was so ugly, i hated it. I can’t red books with a cover i don’t like and it was so old that the pages fell out. It was the first book I read in English so I was happy that the language was easy enough for me to understand but I didn’t like it.
I’d like to recommend this book to people who like to read in English but aren’t so good at it because Christie wrote in an easy way so it’s not hard. And of course to those, who like detective books.