Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie - review.

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS

(Detective Fiction Novel of Mystery & Suspense)

By Agatha Christie

A surprising murder by a cleaver and ruthless killer had caught the passenger’s attention. Now detective Hercule Poirot is going out there to seek the truth and believing that the killer is still on board.

The Theme of revenge can be clearly found in the book. It is shown in how people will kill one another because the other person had killed someone close to them. This book shows the reader how McQueen helps his family by killing Armstrong. The theme of revenge is very clear because of the way in which the author describes why McQueen had killed Armstrong.

Another major theme in the novel is the Morality of Murder. Because Ratchett escapes justice in the United States, the Armstrong family is determined to kill him and prevent him from hurting any more children. One of the main themes of the novel is the morality of murder. Is it all right to kill a man, even if law has acquitted him? Is it ever all right to kill a man? The novel suggests, at least by Poirot and the passenger's standards, that murder is Ok under the right circumstances. If the crime is hideous, there are twelve people who agree that a person is truly guilty and that person is still on the loose, and therefore it is fine to kill him. There are obvious emotional costs, most of the servants are in tears throughout the novel, but, overall, the Armstrongs are successful and probably will not receive punishment for their crime.

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The conflict was simply shown to the reader in the beginning of the story, when Samuel Edward Ratchett, an American citizen, was murdered on a cold and quiet night. No one knows how he dies and who did it. Until that morning after the murder one of his servants stepped into his room and found his dead body lying on the floor and showing no signs of life. When Hercule Poirot found out this news, he decided that he wanted to be the one to solve the mystery. He went around every single room in the Orient Express collecting evidence and confronting the witnesses. After a long investigation Poirot finally found the solution to who the murderer was. The killer was a man name Hector McQueen. Poirot also wanted to find out the reason why McQueen had murder Rachett. Samuel Edward Ratchett wasn’t his real name. His real name is Daisy Armstrong. It was about five to ten years ago when Armstrong had killed McQueen’s family in America. Armstrong went to Europe to escape the truth, but McQueen wanted revenge, so he went on the Orient Express to murder Armstrong.

CONCLUTION:

The novel constantly questions what a jury is and how "just," is this system of justice, especially when a jury is selected like it is done in this history. The final argument of the novel, consistent with Poirot and all the characters is that Ratchett's murder was "just." The jury they formed, and the consensus of 12 people, was right and fair. The "Jury" system puts the whole responsibility of one man's life on the hands of many, rather than one. This is what the state normally does, the state assigns a jury who decides the fate of a man, but there is control over who is selected to be on the jury. If juries were made up of victims family members, such as in the novel, the jury would certainly be one of revenge instead one of justice. However, it cannot be know for sure that Ratchett did not commit the crime. The novel states that Ratchett, or Cassetti, gave a slip to the law, but he may not have been the man who actually murdered Daisy Armstrong.

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