Murder on The Orient Express Analysis Project

1. Murder on The Orient Express Analysis Project • By Ross and Brendan

2. Unfamiliar Vocabulary • Credo (N): a creed • Lovelorn (ADJ): being without love • Suffice (V): to be enough, or sufficient • Pother (N): a disturbance; uproar • Hymeneal (ADJ): of or relating to a wedding or marriage • Metaphysics (N): the branch of philosophy that deals with questions concerning the real nature of the universe.

3. Unfamiliar Vocabulary cont. • Ab Initio (ADV) (Latin): at the beginning, at the start • Deus ex machina (N) (Latin): a plot element when a question or mystery is suddenly solved because of the intervention of a new character, event, or object • Gemütlich (ADJ): pleasant or friendly • Avail (V): to help; to be of use or advantage • Ineptitude (N): the quality of lacking sense or being foolish • Hypodermic (ADJ): relating to the layer just beneath the epidermis; relating to the hypodermis

4. Unfamiliar Vocabulary cont. • Verisimilitude (N): being true or real • Onus (N): a duty or responsibility • Indignation (N): anger by something that is felt to be unfair • Irremediably (ADJ): impossible to correct or repair • Pseudo-science (N): a theory or practice that has no scientific foundation • Cavorting (V): to bound or prance in a sprightly manner • Delineation (N): to draw or sketch the outline of

5. Van Dine’s Rules for Writing Detetctive Stories • The reader must know all the detective knows. • The reader should not be tricked except for tricks played on the detective. • There is no love interest. • The detective or investigator should not be the culprit. • The crime is solved through logical deductions.

6. Van Dine’s Rules for Writing Detective Stories cont. 6. There must be a detective that analyzes. • There must be a murder. • The crime can not be solved supernaturally and the reader must have an equal chance. • There is only one detective. • The culprit must be known to the reader.

7. Van Dine’s Rules for Writing Detective Stories cont. • A servant should not be the culprit. • The murder should by committed by only one person but they can have a lesser companion. • There are not secret societies. • The solution to the crime but be scientific and logical. • The reader must be able to solve the crime.

8. Van Dine’s Rules for Writing Detective Stories cont. • The story must be concise and to the point. • The criminal should be an unexpected criminal. • The crime has to have purpose and not an accident or suicide. • The motive for the crime must be personal. • The author may not use cliché devices.

9. Van Dine’s Rules in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express

10. Van Dine Rule #7: “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. No lesser crime than murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader’s trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded” (Van Dine). • Explanation: The book Murder on the Orient Express follows this rule because obviously it has a murder, and it is necessary to convey the mood of the novel. Since it is a murder and not a suicide, which is deemed impossible, the murderer is still on the train. This adds to the suspense of the story making it a brilliant thriller. • Murder on The Orient Express: “‘It was not suicide, eh?’ The Greek doctor gave him a sardonic laugh. ‘Does a man who commits suicide stab himself in ten, twelve, fifteen places?’” (Christie 41).

11. Van Dine Rule #12: “There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed. The culprit may, of course, have a minor helper or co-plotter; but the entire onus must rest on one pair of shoulders: the entire indignation of the reader must be permitted to concentrate on a single black nature” (Van Dine). • Explanation: This rule is absolutely broken in Murder on the Orient Express because there are twelve murders, not one. Each of the wounds on Ratchett were made by one member of the “jury” of murderers who killed Ratchett together. • Murder on the Orient Express: “I said to myself: This is extraordinary, they cannot all be in it! And then, Messieurs, I saw light. They were all in it…. A jury is composed of twelve people, there were twelve passengers, Ratchett was stabbed twelve times” (Christie 238-9).

12. Van Dine’s Rule # 5: “The culprit must be determined by logical deductions- not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession. To solve a criminal problem in this latter fashion is like sending the reader on a deliberate wild- goose chase, and then telling him, after he has failed, that you had the object of his search up your sleeve all the time. Such an author is no better than a practical joker” ( Van Dine). • Explanation: is basically saying that logical deductions are the best way to solve the crime and determine the culprit. Agatha Christie’s novel Murder on the Orient Express fits this rule because Hercule Poirot uses logic and reasoning to determine the culprit. In this case after Poirot uses his logic, the reader sees there are twelve culprits. Hercule has to sit back and think of who could have committed the crime. He can’t solve this by accident or having someone telling him the answer for no motivated reason. He must solve this crime by logical deductions. The quote below shows an example of this. • Murder On The Orient Express: “This is extraordinary- they cannot all be in it! And then Messieurs, I saw the light. They were all in it. For so many people connected to the Armstrong case to be traveling by the same train through coincidence was not only unlikely: it was impossible. It must not be not chance, but design” ( Christie 238, 239).

13. Van Dine Rule #15: “The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent, provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it. By this i mean if the reader, after learning the explanation for the crime, should reread the book, he would see that the solution had, in a sense, been starring him in the face, that all the clues really pointed to the culprit, and that, and that if he had been as clever as the detective, he could have solved the mystery himself without going on the the final chapter. That the clever reader does often thus solve the problem goes without saying” (Van Dine). • Explanation: There is much foreshadowing in the novel. M. Bouc talking about how all nationalities are on the train, Poirot supposing what would happen if there was an accident during the same conversation, and the colonel speaking about juries are all examples of foreshadowing. We as the reader are given all the information Poirot sees because we are told the story from his point of view for the majority of the time. This insight gives us equal opportunity to solving the crime as Poirot. The quote by Colonel Arbuthnot below is an example of foreshadowing that helps us solve the crime. • Murder on the Orient Express: Colonel Arbuthnot says, “Say what you like, trial by jury is a sound system” (Christie 120).

14. Van Dine’s Rule # 19: “The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal. International plotting and war politics belong in a different category of fiction – in secret- service tales, for instance. But a murder story must be kept gemϋtlich, so to speak. It must reflect the reader’s everyday experiences, and give him a certain outlet for his own repressed desires and emotions” ( Van Dine). • Explanation: The novel Murder on the Orient Express fits because the twelve suspected passengers on the train have a connection to the Armstrong case, which makes them have a personal motive for their killing of Ratchett. Some examples of the passengers’ occupations include: governess, cook, maid, and chauffeur. They all knew Daisy and the Armstrongs and were familiar with what happened to their daughter. This gives them a personal motive to kill Ratchett. • Murder On The Orient Express: “A self appointed jury of 12 people who had condemned him to death and who by the exigencies of the case had themselves been forced to be executioner” ( Christie 239).

15. Does Murder on the Orient Express Fit Van Dine’s Rules? • Although the book complies with most of the rules set by Van Dine, the book absolutely breaks rule #12 as stated earlier. The rule says that detective stories must have only one culprit, and this is not true in Murder on the Orient Express. It is revealed to us that there are twelve culprits who committed the murder. There are ones that obviously fit such as rules 5, 7, 15, and 19. These follow the rules because there is concrete evidence found in the novel; explained in our previous slides.

16. Works Cited Christie, Agatha. Murder on the Orient Express. New York: Berkley, 1933. Print. Van Dine, S.S. "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories." American Magazine Sept. 1929: n. pag. Print.