October finds us celebrating book club and gorgeous fall weather at Carla Gibbs' home. The house is decked out in fall colors and we're ready for Halloween. The food was perfect for this time of year. Carla made two variations on chili: a vegetarian and chicken & navy bean. Side dishes were a salad and baked potato. Cheesecake along with a chocolate and Bundt cake rounded out the meal with our usual assortments of wines, tea and coffee. The atmosphere and was warm and cozy and the food was of the comfort variety.
In attempting to keep with a Halloween theme and also tagging off of last months book, we picked Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie. In last months book, our heroine was reading an Agatha Christie novel and spent time at the Club 21 in NYC. Carla G discovered that, coincidentally, Club 21 is owned by a company called Orient Express. So it seemed meant to be. Agatha Christie is a prolific and well known writer of murder mysteries. She published books between 1920 and 1976, the year she died. In biographical material I found she has sold 4 billion copies of her books and is 3rd in popularity only to Shakespeare and the Bible (in that order).
The book sparked quite a lively conversation in spite of the fact that most of us felt it was formulaic and lackluster. It rated a 3.3. For one thing, this particular book was published in 1936 and technology has come a long way since then. Most people are filled with sophisticated detective processes thanks to shows like NCIS and Law and Order, just to name a few. In Ms. Christie's books her detectives rely on more simple methods of deduction. And, trapped on the train, our intrepid detective, Hercule Poirot, does not have even the simplest of methods at his disposal. He is relying solely upon his keen methods of observation and his interrogation skills. I found Hercule quite comical - and someone did offer that they thought he was the inspiration for the comedic Pink Panther movies. As our story opens Hercule has just solved a murder and has boarded the train. Just as the murder happens the train is stuck in snowstorm. And just as the mystery is solved, the train mysteriously jolts forward. The cast of characters ranks at an even dozen, which factors prominently in the story. At first, they seem like any random and odd assortment of travelers thrown together by circumstance. But our razor sharp Poirot soon learns that they are all connected in someway, even down to the trains porter, to an earlier kidnapping and murder of wealthy families child. This part of the story reminded me somewhat of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. As in all of her mysteries the murder happens early and the story revolves around the figuring out, by process of elimination, which of the cast of characters committed the crime. This book has a twist ending with two possible scenarios; either none of them did it, a stranger enters & exits the train having committed the murder OR, they all did it.
It really has a most humorous ending. The victim has been poisoned by his assistant and then one by one all 12 passengers come into his room and stab him as a symbolic act of the pain he has caused. He is the person responsible for the crime of kidnapping and murdering the child. He deserves to die. So Hercule decides to tell the police it was the stranger and lets all the others off the hook. The funniest part of the whole book to me is that such a famous and accurate detective was asleep in the next room while 12 people lined up in the hall and walked in and out of the room and stabbed a man 12 times.
The most interesting thing to me about Agatha Christie is that after 14 years of marriage, her first husband asked for a divorce. He was in love with a woman named Nancy Neele. When he left Agatha to spend the weekend with his mistress, Agatha staged her own disappearance. She left her car, with an expired license and some clothes in one location and no one could find her for 10 days, despite the fact that about 15,000 police and volunteers were looking for her. When she surfaced she was at a hotel registered as Mrs. Theresa "Neele". She did go onto have a long and loving marriage with her 2nd husband who was an archaeologist. He was 14 years her junior. Their travels gave her lots of material for future books and they were married 46 years and died two years apart in 1976 and 1978 respectively.
November's book club will be at Pam's new house. Location: directly across the street from the old house. Our book is "One Amazing Thing."
