Murder on the Orient Express Literary Elements

Detective story

In the 1930s, on a train coach traveling from Istanbul to Calais

Third-person limited narrator

The tone is terse and matter-of-fact, but the novel's mood is tense and suspenseful.

The protagonist is Poirot, while the antagonist is Ratchett.

The major conflict is Ratchett's murder and the quest to find his killer.

The book's climax is Poirot's announcement of his conclusions to the gathered passengers.

M. Bouc says of his passengers that "perhaps, all these here are linked together—by death." This not only foreshadows the upcoming murder of Ratchett, but also the revelation that the passengers are already linked by the death of Daisy Armstrong.

While witnessing Arbuthnot and Debenham argue early in the novel, Poirot notes how strange their conversation is. The narrator then writes, "He was to remember that thought of his later." This moment foreshadows the upcoming investigation, which will cause every seemingly mundane moment from these early chapters to be viewed with new scrutiny.

At first, Christie understates Poirot's presence by calling him a "Belgian stranger" despite the fact he is likely well-known to her readers.

The case of Daisy Armstrong was inspired by the real-life kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh, Jr.

The Orient Express was a real and popular train service in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though the name "Orient Express" has been used at various times to apply to a wide variety of routes and trains.

Images of cold and snow outside the train contrast with images of heat inside it, emphasizing the train's enclosed and inescapable nature.

The image of glowing words appearing on the half-destroyed letter written to Ratchett hints at the passion and grief animating Ratchett's killers.

Agatha Christie must, paradoxically, incorporate conventions of the mystery genre without sacrificing suspense. She does this by depicting her characters as consumers of the genre themselves, able to manipulate and use its most familiar conventions and cliches.

The murder of Daisy Armstrong parallels the murder of Ratchett. In the same vein, Ratchett's role as a killer parallels that of the many passengers who ultimately kill him.

Poirot's iconic, noticeable mustache is regularly used to represent Poirot as a whole via synecdoche.

Descriptions of the train, which describe it as moving "with a terrific jerk" or recount that it "plunged into a tunnel," lightly personify the Orient Express itself.