In the winter of 1933, the Belgian detective and former police officer Hercule Poirot boards the Orient Express in Istanbul that will take him on a three-day train journey across the European continent. Somewhere in the Balkans, the train comes to an unexpected halt as large snowdrifts cover the tracks. The next morning, an American businessman who occupied the compartment next to Poirot is found murdered ― stabbed to death.
Since there is no obvious suspect and furthermore since the clues are mysterious ― a handkerchief embroidered with the letter “H,” a button from a uniform, and a pipe cleaner ― the master detective is called into action.
Poirot eventually discovers that all of the passengers onboard are somehow related to a particular family whose three-year old daughter was once kidnapped and killed by a nasty character called Mr. Cassetti. Mr. Cassetti, of course, turns out to be the murdered American businessman on the Orient Express. The solution is clear: the passengers were all part of the crime and their motive was revenge.
This is the plot of Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express,” one of the most celebrated detective stories of the 20th century. Published in 1934, at a time when Europe was on the brink of yet another disastrous war, Christie’s narrative is about a murder committed in the Balkan wilderness, not far from the place where the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated 20 years earlier, an incident which marked the beginning of the First World War.
And yet, the political dimension is strangely absent in the story. The novel begins with a scene during which Poirot converses with a French lieutenant while waiting for a train to Istanbul. They talk about the weather. A lot of snow has fallen over the Balkans, the soldier remarks. And Germany, Poirot adds.
The absence of politics is deliberate ― not only in Agatha Christie’s works, but in almost all detective stories; it is a distinctive characteristic of the genre. Another characteristic is the repetitiveness.
Christie wrote 66 detective novels and an endless number of short stories, almost all of which following the same literary structure, the whodunit formula; a murder occurs, the detective enters the stage, clues are gathered, suspects interrogated, the crime incident is reconstructed, the culprit is identified, and finally the criminal confesses and explains.
As readers, we are constantly being asked if we can somehow anticipate the detective’s conclusion and guess who did it ― and, of course, we can’t. That is one of the reasons why we return to the detective story, why this genre continues to fascinate us ― whether it be Agatha Christie’s formulaic yarns, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe stories, or more recent variants like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
We return to the mysterious crime scene, again and again, as if it can never be cleared up, once and for all; as if we must continuously unravel it, over and over, no matter how many detective stories we read.
What is at stake in this compulsive return to the unsolved mystery? In one sense, it is the promise of return as such. There is a regressive element in all detective stories, a desire to return to the point before the crime ― which is only possible insofar as the crime is solved so that we can get on with our lives. To restore everything as it was before; this is the nostalgic promise of the genre. An unsolved crime poisons everything; it paralyzes us, like the Theban curse in “Oedipus Rex.”
Agatha Christie wrote her most famous detective stories in between the two world wars, a period during which Europe seemed to have lost its way in a vacuum of purposelessness and moral confusion. Christie’s detective stories reduce a complex geopolitical reality of multiple causes and motives into a single, concrete narrative with clearly identifiable culprits, innocents, motives and, notably, one solution to the mysterious crime.
The same, more or less, could be said about contemporary detective stories. All detective stories ― which adhere to the traditional formula ― offer two narratives, one located in the past and one in the present; one for the crime and one for the solution. The former ends before the latter starts, and the only physical thing that connects them is the clue ― a handkerchief, a button, or a pipe cleaner. It is in this way that the detective genre establishes an organic link between the past and the present, a link which rationally determines the present.
The link must necessarily be rationally determinable; otherwise the detective wouldn’t be able to decode the clue rationally, and thus legitimately solve the mystery. Via the clue, the detective reconciles the contradictions between past and present, locking them together in a mutually determining relationship.
In a further sense, it is as if the detective not only promises to solve the mystery of past ― and thus fill out the gaps of the present ― but also to recreate history as such, what really happened back then (this explains why the motives behind the crime ― whether it is money, revenge, or unhappy love ― often appear to be of secondary importance).
Underlying the formal dynamic of the detective story, one finds a carefully defined notion of history ― history as, essentially, a repetitive structure of stable, fixed codes; a structure in which past and present clues, as well as their meanings, are identical, and in which causes always produce the same effects.
But for all the convincing work of the detective ― and we, the readers, want to be convinced by the logical explanation the detective offers us ― one of the more subversive aspects the genre implicitly raises is the tantalizing question whether it really is the real explanation, or, even more radically, whether the detective’s explanation of the past is merely an invention that may well fill the gaps of the present, but which does not correspond to the actual past.
After all, the past is only present in the form of clues. In this sense, the nostalgic promise of the genre may also be seen to contain an ideological element; the promise to restore an “original” scene which might never have existed in the first place.
“The past,” Walter Benjamin observes in his essay on history, “carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption.” To Benjamin, real history is not the one written by the triumphant ― it is rather the unwritten, unarticulated history of the defeated, the conquered, and the colonized; real history is an index of repressed crimes, violence, and oppression.
False history, by contrast, is the one that justifies the deeds of the victors, their right to rule in present time. One important characteristic of the detective story is the false solution, the one typically proposed by Dr. Watson or the police officer ― and which, by the end of the story, is replaced by the detective’s true solution.
In a more general sense, one could say that the detective genre as a whole represents a false solution, an ideological distraction that makes us forget the real crimes of the past, whether it be in 1934 or nowadays.
At the same time, the formal function of the false solution is to make us, the readers, aware that something is not quite right; its function is to make us suspicious of explanations that are too neat and straightforward.
When Hercule Poirot finally discovers who the true culprits in Murder on the Orient Express are (i.e. all of them), he notably offers two possible solutions, one patently false and the other evidently true.
Sympathizing with the perpetrators, Poirot declares the false solution to be the right one ― as if to indicate that even if the detective genre may provide us with the right solution to the mystery of the past, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the right one for the present.
By Eli Park Sorensen
Eli Park Sorensen is an assistant professor in the College of Liberal Studies at Seoul National University. He specializes in comparative literature, postcolonial thought and cultural studies. ― Ed.
