MURDER on the Orient E xpress Analysis Project

1. MURDER on the Orient Express Analysis Project By: Jordan Bernhardt and Isaac Palacios

2. 10 Vocab words • Hymeneal (adjective)- of or pertaining to marriage • Expenditure (noun)- the act of expending something, especially funds/to use up something • Metaphysics (noun)- The branch of philosophy that treats of first principle • Onus (noun)- a difficult or disagreeable obligation, tasks, burden • Indignation (noun)- strong displeasure of something • Camorras (noun)- a secret society of Naples, Italy, associated with blackmail and robbery • Irremediably (adjective)- Not admitting of remedy, cure, and repair • Cavorting (verb)- To prance or caper about, to behave high spirited • Verisimilitude (noun)- the appearance or semblance of truth; likelihood; probability • Spinster (noun)- A woman who is unmarried beyond usual age of marrying.

3. 20 Rules for writing a detective story: 1-10 • 1) The reader must also be able to solve the mystery. All clues must be stated and described. • 2) No tricks played on the reader unless they are legitimately played by the criminal or detective. • 3) There must be no love interest with the detective. • 4) The detective cannot be the culprit. • 5) The culprit must be determined by logical deduction. • 6) The detective must have a detective who figures out the mystery by detecting. • 7) There must be a corpse involved in the novel. • 8) The mystery must be solved by naturalistic means. • 9) There must only be one detective. • 10) The reader must be familiar with the culprit.

4. 20 Rules for writing a detective story:11-20 • 11) The servant/butler/maid may not be the culprit. • 12) There must be one culprit responsible for all murders. • 13) No secret societies, camorras, or mafias. • 14) The method of the murder and the means of detecting it must be scientific. • 15) The truth of the crime must always be apparent. • 16) The novel should not contain long descriptive passages, or subtle occurrences. • 17) No professional criminals. • 18) No accidents or suicides. • 19) Personal motivations for murder only. • 20) No cliché clues.

5. Rule #4 “The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be he culprit. This is bald trickery, on a par with offering some one a bright penny for a five-dollar gold piece. It’s false pretenses”(Van Dine). “He awoke some hours later, awoke with a start. He knew what it was that had awaken him- a load groan almost a cry, somewhere close at hand. At the same moment the ting of a bell sounded sharply”(Christie 32). • In Murder on the Orient Express Poriot is the detective. He solves this gruesome murder with the help of two people. He finds out in the end that everyone on the train stabbed him once except him and two other people. In rule #4 it says the detective cannot be the culprit in the story. Poriot is the detective and he was one of the people who did not murder Ratchett.

6. Rule #7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. No lesser crime in the murder will suffice. Three hundreds pages is too much pother for a crime other than a murder. After all, the reader’s trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded”(Van Dine). “It is not pretty, he said . Someone must have stood there stabbed him again and again. How many stab wounds are there exactly. I make it twelve. One or two are so slight as to be scratches. On the other hand, at least three would be capable of causing death” (Christie 54). • Murder on the Oriental Express fits many rules of Van Dine’s Twenty rules for writing a detective story, specifically on rule #7. Rule #7 states that there must be a corpse in the story and the deader the better. Ratchett is the person who is murdered in the story. He is stabbed 12 times and he lied dead in his own bed.

7. Rule #10 “The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story- that is, a person with whom the reader is familiar and in whom he takes an interest”(Van Dine). “Poirot cut himself short. ‘Did you ever come across any members of the Armstrong family?” “No, I don’t think so. It is difficult to say”(Christie 132). • The novel fits rule #10, the reader had knowledge of who the culprits were and we were very familiar with them. Detective HerculePoirot interviews each passenger on the train. During these interviews we learn a lot about their pasts and who they are.

8. Rule #11 “A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person- one that wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion”(Van Dine). “First of all, I should like a word or two with Ratchetts young secretary, Mr. MacQueen. He may be able to give us valuable information”(Christie 45). • Rule #11 clearly states that a servant, butler, or maid cannot commit the crime. In Murder on the Orient Express Mr. McQueen helps murder Ratchett. MacQueen is the servant/secretary of Ratchett, so it would fail this rule.

9. Rule #19 “The motives for all cries in detective stories should be personal. International plotting's and war politics belong in a different category of fiction--- in secret-service tales, for instance. But a murder story must be kept gemutlich, so to speak. It must reflect the reader’s everyday experiences, and give him a certain outlet for his own repressed desires and emotions. When she was three years old she was kidnapped, and an impossibly high sum demanded as the price of her return. I will not weary you with all the intricacies that followed. I will come to the moment when, after the parents had paid over the enormous sum of $200,000, the child's dead body was discovered; it has been dead for at least a fortnight public indignation rose to a fever point. And there was worse to follow. Mrs. Armstrong was expecting another baby following the shock of the discovery, she gave birth prematurely to a dead child, and herself died. Her broken hearted husband shot himself(Christie 64). • On the train 12 people murdered Ratchett. They all were related to a little girl Daisy who was killed by Ratchett. They were all heart broken after this happened. It cause the mother to go into early birth which killed her and the baby. Then the father committed suicide. Everyone related to them was devastated. So they all planed to get on the same train to kill Ratchett. In rule #19 it states that there can only be personal motivation for the murder. Everyone who stabbed him on the train were all related to the Armstrong family in one way or another.

10.  • Murder on the Orient Express follows all of Van Dine’s rules excepts for numbers 11 and 12. Rule #11 states that a servant of the victim may not turn out to be the culprit. In the book Ratchett has a secretary named Hector MacQueen, Who turns out to be one of the culprits in the murder of Ratchett. The book also doesn’t follow rule #12. Rule #12 basically states that there must be one culprit responsible for all murders. In this book there were 12 people responsible for one murder. As Van Dine said, “if the book breaks one rule it is not a detective novel”. Murder on the Orient Express broke 2 rules which means that according to Van Dine, Agatha Christie didn’t write a detective novel. We personally think that the book was a detective novel. It had the suspense, the mystery, the tricks, and the confusion that all detective novels have. Van Dines rules are opinion, but so are our thoughts of the book. Those rules were written in 1928, we think its time for an update.

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