Imme van Gorp's Reviews > Murder on the Orient Express

|| 2.5 stars ||

I have to admit that I am honestly quite baffled by this book’s popularity. I mean, it wasn’t super bad, but it surely wasn’t great either. I was all just very... mweh.

First of all, the mystery itself is quite preposterous and far-fetched. In fact, the actual reveal of the murder is so convoluted that the book basically needs to shove aside all the facts it has stated before to make it make sense. It is revealed in the end that basically everything was a misdirection and that every single witness was lying. Like, okay?? I guess I’m supposed to be shocked by that, but all it really did was make me feel like the whole book was a waste.
After all, there was no real mystery in the book, because there was no way you could have figured it out. All the evidence seemed to point towards an impossible crime, because, it turns out, it really was impossible! The crime simply did not happen that way. So, we spend all this time trying to figure out a mystery that was never going to be solved! Instead, we got a big “SIKE!” moment where we’re told everything isn’t as we thought it was.
I don’t like ‘mysteries’ that end like that; it feels like a major cop-out, and basically absolves the author from actually having the explain the murder in a smart way. Honestly, I prefer a well thought out murder mystery over a silly plot-twist any day.

Now, when it comes to the writing, I have to say I’m having mixed feelings. On the one hand the writing was simple and straight-forward, which made it very easy to follow along with. On the other hand, however, the book was structured in a way that I found very repetitive and monotonous. The characters lacked any depth whatsoever, and everything had a very cold or sterile feeling to it. There is also no action or even a hint of suspense going on here, and instead the whole thing took on a very methodical note. It was a giant listing of evidence after evidence, only for it to later be revealed that all the “evidence” was nothing but lies and misdirection! What on earth have I spent all this time reading it for then??

The main character, Hercule Poirot, also got on my nerves for some reason. He was a very pretentious little man, who was thriving on his so called ‘intellect’, willing every person to acknowledge how smart he was. He didn’t do or say anything interesting, and was painfully unhelpful the whole way through, but did keep on asking people things like “isn’t it obvious”, when in reality, it really was NOT obvious, because the whole thing was frustratingly ridiculous and insanely coincidental!

Also, I was kind of surprised by all the casual racism and sexism displayed in this book. It was even more frustrating since these prejudices were actually used as evidence to either condemn or absolve suspects in the whole murder investigation. Like, how can I take this mystery seriously when racism/sexism is used as a serious investigative method? They called their prejudices “the Psychology” to give it an air of being scientific, when in reality, it was nothing but offensive rubbish.
For example: They reason that the murderer must be a woman because no man would be hysterical enough to stab a man twelve times. They also reason that the murderer cannot be an Englishman because they are not crass enough to stab people. Instead, the Italian man is suspected because he has the temperament and vulgarity for it! Like, really??? I’m supposed to take this investigation seriously in any way?? I think not.