The Mystery of the Blue Train: Agatha Christie Hated This Book!

Agatha Christie pretty much changed detective fiction and the mystery genre forever with her first few books, and The Mystery of the Blue Train is kinda fascinating in how there seems to be a huge disconnect between the book’s reputation and her feelings about it. It was published in 1928, according to her own autobiography, Agatha “always hated it,” and it’s not very hard to understand why. Like The Big Four before it in 1927, the creation of the book was dulled by the personal trauma Agatha was experiencing at that time, which included an impending divorce from her infidelious husband and the death of her mother and her subsequent eleven-day disappearance. 

But she still had books to write and a living to make, especially now that she was newly single. Perhaps because she needed a boost to start writing again and didn’t want to start from nothing, Agatha based the plot on her 1923 short story “The Plymouth Express,” which also starred Hercule Poirot. Even with a lot of details already fleshed out, Agatha still struggled to write the book. 

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd elevated her as a major figure in detective fiction and boosted her career just as personal tragedy struck. She could have given up and stopped writing, and the world would’ve given her a lot of grace and understand. However, despite her negative experience, Agatha proved that she was able to write her way through difficult circumstances and come out the other end a stronger and more professional writer. 

In fact, you could argue that The Mystery of the Blue Train is a turning point and the beginning of the rest of her career. The Agatha Christie character universe started to expand, with the mention of St. Mary Mead, the fictional village home to Miss Marple, another Christie creation. It’s the first appearance of Poirot’s valet George, and Mr. Goby would later show up in After the Funeral (1953) and Third Girl (1966). We also meet Pierre Michel, a conductor on the blue train that later reappears in Murder on the Orient Express (1934).

And speaking of Orient Express, it seems that with Blue Train, Agatha stumbled onto the concept of a moving train being the perfect setting for a murder mystery. Strangers are brought together temporarily, movement is restricted, and makeshift communities of people who don’t know each other very well are suddenly formed, creating an ecosystem of claustrophobia and distrust. Agatha wrote a pretty good book about a mystery happening on a train when she was going through pretty much the worst part of her life, and it may have been practice for delivering the iconic masterpiece of Murder on the Orient Express.

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Cover image credit: View of France is by Frédéric Ducarme and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license per Wikimedia Commons.

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