Late at night, on a train hit by a blizzard, the sleeping passengers were awakened by a wail. The next day, the train trapped by the snow could not move, but the window of a box with a locked door was open, and the passengers lying in the box full of snow were stabbed twelve times... #我在岛屿读书 #
From all the signs at the scene, it is clear that this is a homicide. But who is the dead? Why was he killed? And who is the murderer? Why did he kill? Where is the murderer now? Is it to open the window and jump out of the train to escape, or to hide among the passengers on the train...
As the passenger on the train, who happened to be a senior detective, investigated the case more and more confusingly, the detective deduced two very different conclusions.
Although this is not a real event, it is a novel created by the author called "Murder on the Orient Express", but its inspiration came from a real kidnapping.
The author of this novel is Agatha Christie, who was awarded the title of "Queen of Detective Fiction" by the Queen of England. Agatha Christie wrote 78 detective novels in her lifetime, which were translated into more than 103 languages and distributed around the world, with a total sales of more than 2 billion copies, most of which were put on the film and television screen. She is one of the "Three Masters of Speculative Literature" along with Matsumoto Kiyohari of Japan and Arthur Conan Doyle of the United Kingdom. However, Agatha, who fought in World War I, has a life experience that is different from that of mortals.
Agatha Christie was born on 15 September 1890 to a wealthy family in Torquay, Devon, England. Smart since childhood, under the cultivation of her mother, she learned to read at the age of 5, which led to her interest in reading. At the age of 6, Agatha Christie lived in France with her father's family on vacation for a period of time in France, where the cost was low, and Agatha Christie received a period of education in France.
After returning to England, with the death of his father due to acute pneumonia, his sister Maggie married, and his brother dropped out of school and joined the army, leaving only his mother and Agatha Christie in the family. It was then that 11-year-old Agatha Christie did a great deal of English and French reading, including works by Dickens, Thackeray and Alexandre Dumas.
In addition to reading, Agatha Christie enjoys watching stage plays and musicals, and every time she visits her aunt in Ealing, London, she goes to the theatre to watch stage plays and musicals, which have become a big hobby. Gradually, influenced by reading and watching plays, coupled with the influence of her talented sister, Agatha Christie developed a desire to create. So, I also began to try to write some poetry, novels, and even screenplays.
However, Agatha Christie did not embark on the road of writing, but at the suggestion of her mother, she came to a boarding school in Paris, majoring in piano and vocal music. But it didn't take long for Agatha Christie's voice to be considered promising, her acting phobia forced her and her mother to sensibly abandon their dreams of being musicians.
In 1909, at the age of 20, Agatha Christie accompanied her ailing mother to Egypt to recuperate. While attending social events, Agatha Christie was encouraged by her mother to complete her first novel, "Snow-covered Desert", and received enthusiastic guidance from her novelist neighbors.
With the deepening of reading and creation, Agatha Christie was greatly influenced by the works of writers May Sinclair, Gaston Leroux and others, especially Gaston Leroux's "The Mystery of the Yellow House", which inspired Agatha Christie's passion for creating detective novels.
But just when Agatha Christie decided to enter the field of detective fiction, her sister Maggie poured cold water on her, and Maggie stubbornly believed that Agatha Christie could not write detective novels, and seriously persuaded her to do something else. But the tenacious Agatha Christie does not think so, but has strengthened her determination to create detective novels.
However, Agatha Christie's creative path did not open there, and as a dashing and young pilot entered her life, at the age of 24, she married the man named Archie Christie and started a family. However, the sudden outbreak of the First World War brought their married life together and separated more.
After his marriage, Archie went to France and Agatha Christie became a volunteer in the hospital. During her nearly two years of studying and honing as a medical volunteer, Agatha Christie became a legally qualified pharmacist, and the growth of knowledge of drugs and poisons made some of the detective novels she conceived become a reality.
In 1916, at the age of 26, Agatha Christie wrote The Mysterious Case of Stiles, but the novel was rejected several times. Frustrated, she submitted the article again and devoted herself to a happy life with her returned husband.
In 1919, with the birth of her daughter, another surprise of Agatha Christie followed, and "The Mysterious Case of Stiles" disappeared for 2 years and was barely serialized in Time magazine for 25 pounds. However, with the publication of The Mysterious Case of Styles in 1920, Agatha Christie's fame began to shine in the British literary scene.
However, the critically acclaimed detective novels did not bring good luck to Agatha Christie's life. In 1926, Agatha Christie's famous work "Roger's Mystery" was published, but her mother died suddenly of illness, and just when she was heartbroken by her mother's death, her husband Archie left her desperately for another woman.
35-year-old Agatha Christie was shocked by the double pain and fell into a deep state of depression, and she thought about suicide. But for the sake of her 7-year-old daughter, Agatha Christie survived strong after 12 days of mysterious disappearance.
Deprived of financial resources, Agatha Christie had to write novels to earn money in order to live and raise her daughter. The year after her divorce from Archie, Agatha Christie boarded the Orient Express for the first time and went to the Middle East to experience the special customs. Later, she often took this train between the Middle East and the United Kingdom, either to relax or to collect works, but what Agatha Christie herself did not expect was that on this train, she would create "Murder on the Orient Express" with the same name as "Massacre on the Nile".
In 1932, Lindbergh, the pilot who had flown a plane and flew across the Atlantic, found a note on the windowsill of his home, and learned that his son, who was less than 2 years old, had been taken away, and on this note was written that he would be asked to pay $50,000 to redeem his son.
It was clear that this was a kidnapping for money. However, when Lindbergh managed to scrape together a ransom of $50,000 according to the kidnapper's request, he waited for his son's body.
This kidnapping, considered the "crime of the century," is one of the most famous kidnappings in American history, which inspired Agatha Christie and, more importantly, touched her multiple associations of "justice, about dignity, about the legitimacy of revenge."
In 1933, Agatha Christie began to work on Murder on the Orient Express while accompanying her second husband on an archaeological excavation in Iraq.
However, before starting to work on Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie had been on the Orient Express for six days in 1929 when her Orient Express was hit by a snowstorm in Turki. In December 1931, Agatha Christie was again on the Orient Express but had to stay for another 24 hours due to floods and landslides. These personal experiences and observations naturally became the inspiration for the blizzard weather and trip interruptions in the "Murder on the Orient Express" novel.
Agatha Christie's The Orient Express Scheme was first published on January 1, 1934. The novel revolves around the murder on a luxury train called the "Orient Express", telling the story of detective Poirot who solves the mystery on the murderous train, quickly captures the suspect Cassetti, and quickly enters the trial stage, and then locks the real murderer among the twelve suspects.
The novel also discusses the contradictions between lynching and legal controversy in the absence of the rule of law. The 12 suspects acted in lieu of the law and stabbed each of the dead Ratchett as a final punishment for Ratchett, the murderer who caused the devastating tragedy of Armstrong's family.
In the novel "Murder on the Orient Express", Agatha Christie hooks the reader's reading interest with two suspense cleverly left:
The first mystery is, who is the real murderer? It is not until the reader finishes reading the entire novel that the murderer gradually emerges, but the real murderer is beyond people's expectations.
The second mystery is that the motive for the murder was unexpected. After detective Poirot found out the murderer's motive, he had major questions about whether the truth of the murder was important or justice was more important, and hesitated whether to make the real murderer public.
After the publication of "Murder on the Orient Express", as early as 1975, Ingrid Bergman won the third Oscar for her film based on Agatha's novel of the same name "Murder on the Orient Express".
In 2017, the latest film of the same name, produced by Twentieth Century Fox Films, based on the novel "Murder on the Orient Express", was released in the United Kingdom. On November 10 of the same year, the film was released in China.
Agatha Christie wrote more than 80 novels, more than 100 short stories, and 17 plays in her lifetime, and is known as the "universally recognized queen of detective novels". UNESCO reported in 1961 that Agatha Christie was the world's best-selling author at the time.
After Agatha Christie's death on January 12, 1976, some estimates estimated that her works had sold 400 million copies worldwide. For her literary achievements, the Queen of England awarded her the title of "Lady Agatha" in 1971.
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