Murder on the Orient Express

A man lies dead in the sleeping car of a snowbound train, stabbed a dozen times. But which of the thirteen passengers could have done such a thing? Fear not, for legendary 1930s detective Hercule Poirot is on the case! Let's listen in as he runs over the facts and the evidence with his colleagues...

"So, you see, sir, he couldn't have done it. Tonio may be a foreigner, sir, but he's a very gentle creature – not like those nasty murdering Italians one reads about." 

"This is the act of a man driven almost crazy with a frenzied hate – it suggests more that Latin temperament. Or else it suggests, as our friend the chef de train insisted, a woman." 

"A miserable race, the English – not sympathetic." 

"It is a woman. Depend upon it, it was a woman. Only a woman would stab like that." 

"I have the little idea, my friend, that this is a crime very carefully planned and staged. It is a far-sighted, long-headed crime. It is not – how shall I express it? – a Latin crime. It is a crime that shows traces of a cool, resourceful, deliberate brain – I think an Anglo-Saxon brain." 

"He is an Italian, and Italians use the knife! And they are great liars! I do not like Italians." 

"She seems a very charming young lady – the last person in the world to be mixed up in a crime of this kind. She is cold. She has not emotions. She would not stab a man – she would sue him in the law courts.”

Oh boy, wow!

Seriously, I actually found Agatha Christie's characters' antiquated but earnest prejudices kind of charming. Look at this eccentric little investigator, putting as much weight behind the idea that Italians are stab-happy thugs as he does behind key pieces of evidence like a dropped handkerchief and a broken pocket watch. The whole book made me feel giddy imagining some sort of Professor Layton spin-off where phrenology and sexism are Layton's modus operandi. "Now Luke, a gentleman never bothers a lady during her blood week. That would be a decidedly Greek thing to do."

At any rate, this one's a classic, and I can see why. A car train stuck in a snowstorm provides an almost too-perfect murder mystery set up, and while the ultimate solution pushes the limits of what's believable it doesn't quite break them entirely. And Poirot is so polite and calm while treating everyone around him like an idiot that you hardly notice the bigoted arrogance baked into his deductions. I didn't like this as much as And Then There Were None but Agatha Christie is now two for two on my end.