The Mystery of The Blue Train, A Hercule Poirot Novel by Agatha Christie

The Book

    Miss Katherine Grey is left a lot of money, two million pounds, in the will of her late employer. After the funeral, Katherine gives some of the money to the lady's family, not a lot, as they are distant relations who thought she was poor and never visited her in the last decade of her life, but some. Just to honest and leaves the tiny village of St. Mary Meade for Nice and her avaricious distant cousin's house. She's happy to go, because she just wants to travel, having not left England at all in her 33 years. Being a little bit to old for marriage, she is free to pursue the world as she wishes. She is blessed to be an even tempered, smart, sensible and extremely attractive woman. After crossing The Channel between Dover and Calais, she takes The Blue Train down to the French Riviera.

    On board, she sees meets a lonely woman who is in the midst of a nasty divorce, Ruth Kettering. Ruth is defying her wealthy American father, and seeing her lover, a man who is most likely a swindler. They strike up a conversation, and Katherine feels she lost friend when she advised the woman to turn around and go home an finish her divorce before she goes on any adventures with her lover. 

    Katherine does not confide this to her intriguing new friend, a man who is traveling to Nice for pleasure and who teases her about her reading of mystery novels. Instead, she says she never gets mixed up in things like this. The fussy little man tells her she is lucky.

    The next morning, when the train pulls into the station in Nice, Ruth Kettering is discovered to be dead. Katherine, having spoken with the woman, is questioned as a witness, and it turns out she was talking to none other than Hurcule Poirot. Together the two of them pursue Ruth Kettering's murder by tracing her missing jewels. When the case takes an unexpected turn, Katherine returns home to St. Mary Meade to nurse an old friend who is dying of cancer at double her pervious pay. There to remain happy, but several of the men who had been pursuing her visit her there. And she receives advice that she sensibly chooses to take from Papa Poirot. She is amazed when he unmasks the murder and is happy to know she helped him solve the case. 

My Thoughts

    OMG, I was waiting for a Miss Marple sighting. I was dying for it in fact. I know Miss Marple will make her debut in just a few more books, and I know that Agatha Christie wrote at a furiously fast pace in this time while she was recovering from her divorce from Archie Christie. And we get our ideas when and how we get them. 

    It has been interesting to read through these Hercule Poirot novels because for the longest time I could not read a Poirot and I could not watch a Miss Marple. Now, two of these Poirot novels I knew after I started reading them that I had read them before. The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I initially read what Agatha Christie's I had read, in the den of my childhood home. On either side of the fireplace where two gigantic bookshelves, well over seven feet tall. And I was permitted to read anything I liked off of there. My mother had been an English major in college. She had hoped to become and English teacher, but when she did her student teaching, she found being totally blind left her vulnerable inside the classroom and she went into a different line of work. My father, never ever returns a book once he's purchased it. So on the shelves were every single book my father ever had to read in college. He had wanted to be a history teacher, and every book my mother had loved from her college experience, which my father purchased and read out loud to her every night. In fact, to this day, my dad still reads to my mom sometimes. Although it is more likely for them to listen to an audiobook version of something Mom likes. It's been 25 years since I lived with Mom and Dad, even more than that since I read through their books, as I started spending my allowance on what I wanted to read when I was 14. So I don't remember which collection of Agatha Christie my parents owned. I just distinctly remember reading Miss Marple, and I knew Hercule Poirot was an Agatha Christie character, but I didn't remember any of the stories when I started watching the David Suchet version on A & E in the early days of my marriage. 

    That being said, I find that now as I read through them, I get such a different picture inside my head of Poirot, than the most excellent Suchet version. And he fairly jumps off the page. In fact, it need not have been labeled a Poirot novel because when famous detective shows up, even without Christie saying his name, I immediately knew who he was.

How Much My Library Card Saved Me

    There was not a copy of this book available at my library, so I had to request it from the consortium. This copy was sent to my from the Glencoe Public Library. That library has been so small and so underfunded that they were still on the checkout card system until some time in 2021 or perhaps 2022. The date stamped on the Due Date slip in the back of the book has a 2021 year on it. If I had to guess, this is what Glencoe did with their Covid Grant money, upgrade to a digital system. Good for them. This book is in excellent condition, and extremely well read. The cool thing about the due date slip is I can see approximately how frequently the book was checked out of the library. It seems like a patron picked up this book about once a quarter until the pandemic hit. Then it was about twice a year until they went digital. Very cool. It means this book has been read more than ten times, and likely close to 20. It should have a few more good years in it. So, well worth the $12.99 they spent on it. 

This Book                                $12.99

This Summer                        $418.92