Calais to Nice

Le train bleu (the Blue Train), one of the world's great luxury overnight trains, had its origins in a route begun in 1886.  The train ran between Calais, where it connected with the Channel ferry from England, and Nice on the Riviera coast.  Service was suspended during World War I, and resumed in 1920.

Although the train, in one form or another, operated with a steadily declining reputation after World War II until 2003, it was after World War I that it was first called the "Blue Train" (from the color of its sleepers), and it was between the world wars that it enjoyed the height of its fame as a totally deluxe, totally first class train, carrying the cream of British society south to the Riviera for sun and fun.

And it was in 1928, at that same height of its reputation, that Agatha Christie wrote her murder mystery, The Mystery of the Blue Train.  I'm not addicted to murder mysteries or detective stories.  And yet, just two or three months ago I read (or re-read, actually) another Agatha Christie thriller, Murder on the Orient Express.  From those titles, one might surmise that I'm more addicted to railway stories than I am to murder mysteries.  And one would surmise correctly. 

From its title (and from watching the well done 1974 film), you would suppose that the Orient Express novel would be highly atmospheric in its recreation of life on another of the great European trains.  Unfortunately, perhaps because train travel in sleepers was so common when she was writing, Christie really provided very little descriptive detail of the train -- just enough information about the layout of the sleeper compartments and of the diner to advance the plot, together with some information of its route from Istanbul through the Balkans. 

Similarly with the Blue Train. 

The complexities of the Blue Train's plot are (or seemed to me) greater than those of Christie's later Orient Express.  We have the murder itself, committed at some point between Paris and Lyon, as the train headed south.  And we have a surfeit of suspects.  We have both the murdered woman's former and present lover, and her present, soon-to-be divorced husband, riding on the same train with her.  The victim is carrying with her a fortune in rubies, which disappear at the same time as the murder.  We have the victim's maid, who left the train for unknown reasons in Paris, and we have the trusted secretary of the victim's multi-millionaire American father. 

And we have a highly likeable young woman, who meets the victim on the train and somehow remains above the conflicting suspicions of the police.  A likeable young woman who has recently inherited a fortune -- and for comic relief is beset by her conniving distant relatives.

And of course -- as in Orient Express -- we have Hercule Poirot, a French private detective.  Hercule Poirot, a small man with his egg-shaped head and highly waxed mustache who genially claims that "I am probably the greatest detective in the world."

While -- as I understand it -- great murder mysteries provide the reader all the information he needs in order to solve the murder before or at the same time as the detective, in this case a solution would be impossible without an amazing piece of information that M. Poirot reveals only near the denouement.  Never mind.  It's a clever story and fun to read.  Or to re-read, because I've had to go back and discover how the nearly forgotten events in the first half of the story provided elements of the information used by Poirot in the second half.  But it's a fast re-read when one's searching for clues.

So it's an enjoyable mystery.  As is the better known Orient Express.  But neither's the fountain of railway lore from the glory days of the great luxury trains for which the reader -- or at least this reader -- might have hoped.