Summary
Murder on the Orient Express - Everyone Is A Suspect 'Disturbing Truth' TV Commercial Murder on the Orient Express - Behind The Scenes. Murder On The Orient Express 1974, directed by: Sidney Lumetmusic: Richard Rodney Bennettstarring: Albert Finney, Martin Balsam, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergma.
Chapter 6
The passports and the tickets of all the passengers are gathered. Poirot will interview each passenger and firsts calls Hector McQueen, the younger man Poirot has seen with Ratchett. Poirot tells McQueen that his employer, M. Ratchett is dead. The young man is not surprised and replies, 'So they got him after all.' McQueen explains to Poirot that he had worked as Ratchett's secretary for just over a year. He traveled all over the world with Ratchett and was particularly helpful because Ratchett didn't know any languages. McQueen also tells Poirot that his employer was American, full name, Samuel Edward Ratchett, which McQueen thinks is an alias, and was escaping from something. A few weeks back, Ratchett had begun to receive threatening letters. McQueen shows one of the letters to Poirot who determines it has been written by not one, but several people. Mc Queen last saw Ratchett alive at 10PM when he took some memoranda down for him. McQueen is released from the interview.
Chapter 7
Dr. Constantine escorts Poirot to Ratchett's compartment. The room has been left untouched since the murder and Ratchett lies dead on the bed. Dr. Constantine observes that some of the stab wounds were delivered after Ratchett was dead and Poirot notices that some of the blows were delivered right-handed and some left. Some of the blows are very deep and others just scraping the skin. Anther curiosity is two different kinds of matches in the ashtray—one round and one flat. Poirot compares this to Ratchett's matches and suspects the flatter may have been used by the murderer. Poirot also finds an embroidered handkerchief with the initial H on it and a pipe cleaner on the floor. The hands of Ratchett's watch, found in his jacket, are pointed to 1:15. Lastly Poirot discovers a small, charred piece of paper. With a spirit stove, curling tongs and the netting from a lady's hat box Poirot is able to read the paper: '—member little Daisy Armstrong.' Poirot instantly knows whom Ratchett's really is, an American named Cassetti.
Chapter 8
Poirot and Dr. Constantine join M. Bouc in the dining car for lunch. Poirot explains the identity of M. Ratchett. Ratchett, real name Cassetti, was the kidnapper of Daisy Armstrong. Daisy was the three-year-old daughter of Colonel Armstrong, a man with great Wall St. inheritance, and the famous actress, Linda Arden. Daisy was the couple's only child. The young girl was kidnapped and the parents paid 200,000 dollars for her return, but Daisy's body was found dead. Mrs. Armstrong then had a premature child who was born dead and the Colonel shot himself, broken-hearted. At about the same time, the child's nursemaid also committed suicide suspected of some involvement with the crime. About six month later, Cassetti was arrested, but because of his enormous wealth and power he got off. Poirot believes the murderer to erase any connection to the name Armstrong destroyed the charred piece of paper.
Analysis
Mystery writers are often accused of 'sanitizing' murders. They do this to detach the reader from the horror of the crime. Especially in Murder on The Orient Express where the murderers are let off, the writer needs to make the murder as neat and un-extraordinary as possible. Of course, the planning and so forth of Ratchett's murder by the Armstrongs was quite extraordinary, but the blood and gore of the actual crime is lessened to make the murder seem more 'just' and less apprehensible
The treatment and description of Ratchett's body in Chapter 7 is particularly revealing on this point. When Poirot enters Ratchett's compartment the first thing he notices is the cold breeze. He actually goes over to the window and checks for fingerprints on the windowsill before even looking at or acknowledging the body. Poirot even jokes about the temperature of the room, 'Positively it is the cold storage in here!' When Poirot does look at the body with the doctor, he still seems unconcerned. Ratchett's blood is never described as anything too ugly or gruesome, rather his pajama's are stained with 'rusty patches'—presumably of blood. In fact, blood is hardly mentioned except when the doctor speaks of two especially deep wounds that probably severed blood vessels, but did not bleed, as one would have suspected. The crime is also painless, Ratchett was drugged before he was stabbed and apparently did not struggle with his attackers. The men speak about Ratchett's body as if it were a science project, wondering how varied types stab wounds could have been afflicted on the victim.
There is little sympathy expressed towards the victim in Chapter 7. Poirot only takes Ratchett's died once, he asks aloud what Ratchett might have done as he was attacked, 'Does he cry out? Does he struggle? Does he defend himself?' The possible murderers are described with more vigor and passion than Ratchett himself, 'a young, vigorous, athletic woman...in the grip of a strong emotion' or a man with great strength' or a feeble woman or great man' could have done such damage. The descriptions of possible murders are more positive than those given of Ratchett. Even at this early moment the reader is called to sympathize with the young, passionate woman or feeble lady or the man of great strength who struck the beast, as described by Poirot. Christie is working to wear away our sympathy for Ratchett in favor of the Armstrongs. Thus, the challenge and focus of the novel is on the duel between murderer and detective, rather than the murderer and victim. The reader's attention is directed purposefully away from the crime.
In Agatha Christie’s crime novel Murder on the Orient Express, the well-mustachioed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot solves the grisly stabbing of an American tycoon traveling on a long-distance passenger train. While the 1934 story, adapted for a new movie, of murder and revenge on a stuck, snowed-in train is of course a work of fiction, Christie pulled parts of her story straight from the headlines
![Movie Movie](/uploads/1/0/7/0/107021191/436553349.jpeg)
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In Christie’s story, Poirot is on the Orient Express from Syria to London when a man named Ratchett asks Poirot to investigate the death threats he’s been receiving. Poirot declines, telling Ratchett he doesn’t like his face. The next morning, a snowdrift stops the train in its tracks, and Ratchett is found stabbed to death in his compartment.
When Poirot steps back into his detective role and searches Ratchett’s compartment for clues, he finds a scrap of burnt paper that reads “–member little Daisy Armstrong.” He deduces that Ratchett is really a mobster named Cassetti, who kidnapped the 3-year-old heiress Daisy Armstrong and collected $200,000 in ransom from her parents before her dead body was discovered. A wealthy man, he was able to escape conviction and flee the country. The narrative of the book centers around who on the train murdered Ratchett.
Daisy Armstrong’s fictional case probably rang familiar to readers in the mid-1930s, who had followed national coverage of the kidnapping of the baby son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh. Christie’s official website confirms that the author lifted the idea for the subplot from the true-life tragedy. On March 1, 1932, the 20-month-old child disappeared from his crib. A ransom note affixed to the nursery window of their New Jersey home demanded $50,000.
The Lindbergh kidnapping threw the country into a kind of frenzy. Newspapers literally stopped the presses to break the news for the morning edition. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover mobilized agents to help state authorities in the search. One Hearst reporter, Adela Rogers St. John, recalled in her autobiography: “Remember, little Lindy was everybody's other baby. Or if they had none, their only child …. Kidnapped? The Lindbergh baby? Who would DARE?”
In both the novel and real life, the children’s bodies were discovered after the ransom was paid in full. Cassetti killed Daisy shortly after kidnapping her, and Charles Jr.’s body was found four miles from the Lindbergh estate; a tree mover had stumbled across a human skull sticking out from a shallow grave. The body had been decomposing there for two months, with a fractured skull and a hole over his right ear.
The book was hugely popular when it was released, and Lindbergh expert Robert Zorn says that the parallels between Daisy and Charles Jr. must have been obvious to people. “The parallels are too striking,” he says. Agatha Christie even had her own insights about the case. She suspected that the kidnapping was done by a foreigner—a hunch proved correct when the culprit was discovered to be German immigrant Richard Hauptmann. “I think she had a better sense of getting to the heart of this than a lot of the investigators,” he says.
Like the novel’s characters, Christie also knew what it was like to be stuck on a train. She loved traveling on the Orient Express and would bring her typewriter along. On one 1931 ride, the train stopped because of a flood. “My darling, what a journey!” she wrote in a letter to her second husband, Max Mallowan. “Started out from Istanbul in a violent thunder storm. We went very slowly during the night and about 3 a.m. stopped altogether.” She was also inspired by an incident from 1929, when the Orient Express was trapped by snow for five days.
The story of the Lindbergh baby captured the popular imagination in a way that a book never could. As Joyce Milton wrote in her biography of the Lindberghs, Loss of Eden, 1932 was a terrifying time. The country was in the throes of the Great Depression, and Hoovervilles were a common sight. World War I, the “War to End All Wars” hadn’t prevented the creeping rise of totalitarian regimes like fascism and Nazism. Americans couldn’t help but wonder what the world had come to.
Not even the baby of a national hero was safe from kidnappers, and a popular jingle at the time, “Who Stole the Lindbergh Baby?” pondered who would do such a thing.
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“After he crossed the ocean wide, was that the way to show our pride?” the song’s lyrics asked. “Was it you? Was it you? Was it you?”
Kenneth Branagh
As for Poirot himself, Christie never specified a real-life inspiration for her famous character. However, researcher Michael Clapp believes her Belgian detective might have lived right down the street from her. While looking into his own family history, Clapp discovered that Christie had met a retired Belgian policeman-turned-war refugee named Jacques Hornais at a charity event benefitting refugees from Belgium. It’s not definitive proof, Clapp told TheTelegraph, but it’s quite the coincidence.
In the author’s own autobiography, though, she says that Poirot was indeed inspired by one of her Belgian neighbors. “Why not make my detective a Belgian, thought. There were all types of refugees,” Christie wrote. “How about a refugee police officer?”
Using real-life inspirations for Poirot and Orient Express were far from unusual for Christie. In fact, lots of personal experiences left their mark on her stories, whether it was her knowledge of poisons through her work with the British Red Cross or her fascination with a rubella outbreak that inspired The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side. Her imagination ran wild, as she wrote in her autobiography, and she didn’t shy away from letting everyday life inspire her.
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“Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop,” she wrote. “Suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head.”