Murder on the Orient Express

Murder on the Orient Express is a detective novel by the English writer Agatha Christie, published in 1934, in which Christie's detective Hercule Poirot, traveling aboard the Orient Express between Istanbul and Calais, investigates a murder committed in the night after the train becomes stranded by a heavy snowdrift in the Balkans. With the train unable to move and the killer necessarily still among the small group of passengers, Poirot works from the closed set of suspects and their conflicting alibis to reconstruct a crime whose eventual solution ties every passenger to a shared past tragedy. Christie drew partly on her own travels aboard the Orient Express in the late 1920s and on the widely publicized 1932 Lindbergh kidnapping case for elements of the novel's background; the book was published in the United States under the alternate title Murder in the Calais Coach to avoid confusion with an unrelated novel of similar name. One of Christie's most celebrated works, it remains one of the most widely adapted of her novels for film, television and stage.