Murder on the Orient Express

Agatha Christie, an English writer, published the mystery novel Murder on the Orient Express in 1934, in Britain through the Collins Crime Club and in the United States as Murder in the Calais Coach. It features the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.

Poirot is travelling home from the Middle East on the Orient Express when heavy snow stops the train between stations. By morning a wealthy American passenger, Ratchett, has been found dead in his own compartment, stabbed many times, with the door locked from the inside.

No one has left the train, so the killer must still be aboard, and Poirot, who holds a berth only because a director of the train company arranged it, takes up the case. The passengers include Ratchett's secretary and his English valet, and each of them gives an account of the night that does not quite line up with the others.

The book is one of Christie's closed-circle mysteries, in which a fixed group of suspects is cut off with the detective until the puzzle is solved, and it has been adapted for film and television several times.