Roger: Some Thoughts on the 'Orient Express'

It's time to introduce my colleague now, so today we are going to have R. S. writing on his favourite topic of Agatha Christie! - Alex

Adapted from the post at the Impossible Crimes forum, impossible-crimes.ru/Forum/index.php 

According to the plotline, the train gets stuck in heavy snow while being in Yugoslavia, between Vinkovci and Slavonski Brod (both are now in Eastern Croatia), and is stuck perfectly enough to allow Poirot perform and complete the investigation before the tracks are cleared, and the train continues resting in the snow.

Meanwhile, these locations are far from a wild backwater (unless all Eastern Europe in general was the same backwater for the English), but a perfectly plain and heavily populated agricultural district. This, for example, is the railway station at Vinkovci, courtesy Google Maps:

According to the map, there is barely one location between these two where the railway tracks pass through at least five or six kilometres of a forest: the rest is non-stop fields and villages. Of course, the tracks can be in an extreme situation be overridden by snow anywhere at all (including an open section of an underground), this depends on the manner the tracks were positioned (at least some elevation makes the probability slighter). But waiting for them to be cleared for so long is what stretches the possibility. The conductor claims to Poirot that a train was once stuck in the same place for a whole week! (Try to imagine: in the 1930s, a train that departed from Edinburgh fails to enter London for a week due to heavy snow shortly before York. Did you succeed? And that’s the identical situation.) Basically, this is no error (as there is some, however tiny, possibility), but a moment of doubt. Christie herself had found herself in a similar situation once: but in her case, the tracks were put out if condition by heavy raining, and in Turkey to boot. The reviewers mention that the Express was stuck by six days indeed, but, once again, in a very mountainous and backwater part of Turkey.

Funnily: in every single TV and cinema adaptation I’m aware of, the train in standing somewhere in the mountains (without deleting the mention of Vinkovci), and now that is a production error.

It would have seemingly been trivial to avoid any problem: there are mountainous sections along the route of the Express (such as the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border, or to the west, in modern Slovenia). But, alas, stopping the Express exactly as described is a plot point, multiply. Firstly, there is a somewhat important matter of the change in the time-zones while crossing from Bulgaria to Yugoslavia. Secondly, Monsieur Bouc can leave the unhappy car (and thus be moved from the suspect list to the neutral helpers to Poirot, a localized version of Hastings) only after the additional cars are attached, which happens in Belgrade. Thirdly, the places described in the novel are passed by the train at night, while both mountainous Balkans sections are covered in broad daylight (the crime simply must be nightly).

To summarise, the snow in the novel is barely more than a plot convention, no more avoidable than in Hare’s An English Murder and pretending to be a reality of life nowhere more than everything else in this remarkable plot.