An Adventure on the Orient Express: Agatha Sets out in 1928
... undoubtedly, my favourite train. I like its tempo... Allegro con fuoco, swaying, and rattling and hurling one from side to side in its mad haste to leave Calais and the Occident.
--Agatha Christie, Come, Tell Me How You Live (1946) ![[orient]](21701725_orient.jpg) | | Wagon-Lits Diffusion/ADAGP, Paris 2001 | | Poster for the Simplon-Orient Express and Taurus Express, 1930. |
In April 1928, Agatha Christie's divorce from her first husband Archie Christie was finalised. She had been deeply hurt by the experience. She spent the summer finding herself somewhere to live and a school for her daughter Rosalind. Already the well-known author of several successful crime novels, she buried herself in her writing. By the autumn of that year Agatha was ready for a holiday, and began planning a trip to the West Indies. But a chance meeting with a young naval officer and his wife just returned from the Middle East changed her mind, and she decided upon Baghdad instead. She was 38 years old. Travel on the Orient Express All my life I had wanted to go on the Orient Express. When I had travelled to France or Spain or Italy, the Orient Express had often been standing at Calais, and I had longed to climb up into it. Simplon-Orient-Express--Milan, Belgrade, Stamboul...
--Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (1977) The legendary luxury train was managed by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon-Lits, founded by a Belgian, Georges Nagelmakers, in 1872. Nagelmakers had managed to secure contracts for the use of tracks and stations with all the railway companies along the route. He also obtained the use of their locomotives, because Wagon-Lits offered only sleeping, restaurant and baggage-cars. The locomotives were changed over in different countries once the border had been crossed. The company also owned luxury hotels at the major stations along the route, so travellers could break the journey with sightseeing. The service on board the Orient Express was faultless: tables were laid with fine china and silver, and meals were prepared using exotic fresh ingredients. Because the train was the fastest way to travel by land across Europe, it was used not only by royalty, aristocrats, heads of state, businessmen and other wealthy travellers, but also by adventurers, artists, spies and crooks. Crossing into Asia There was a subtle difference on passing from Europe into Asia. It was as though time had less meaning. The train ambled on its way, running by the side of the Sea of Marmora, and climbing mountains... ...we came to a halt, and people got out of the train to look at the Cilician Gates. It was a moment of incredible beauty. I have never forgotten it...
--Agatha Christie, An Autobiography Agatha's journey began at Victoria Station in London, from where she travelled to Calais. There she transferred to the Orient Express, which took her all the way to Istanbul. The train route from Calais to Istanbul covered 3342 kilometres and lasted three days. When passengers arrived at Sirkeçi station, on the European side of the city of Istanbul, they had to cross the Bosphorus by boat. On the Asian side, they were met by a representative of Thomas Cook & Son Limited. After a night's sleep, they were taken to Haydarpasa, a station where they boarded the Taurus Express, named after the mountains in south-eastern Turkey. The Taurus Express was a joint venture between Turkey, Syria, Iraq and the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon-Lits, using the old Baghdad line. At first the train terminated at Nisibin on the Syria-Turkey border, but from 1940 onwards, it travelled all the way to Baghdad.At the time of Agatha's journey in 1928, the line to Baghdad was not finished, so she changed at Aleppo, travelling by local train to Damascus and then on across the desert by Nairn bus. The Nairn Transport Company was started in 1919 by two brothers from New Zealand and ran a regular service from Beirut to Baghdad, via Damascus. It was always uncomfortable, occasionally dangerous, but ultimately captivating. Murder on the Orient Express The murderer is with us--on the train now...
--Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express, (1934) ![[agatha]](21701725_agatha.jpg) | | Rosalind Hicks | | Agatha Christie at the time of her wedding to Max Mallowan, September, 1930. |
The setting for Murder on the Orient Express was suggested to Agatha Christie when she returned from Nineveh, Assyria in 1931 to spend Christmas in England with her daughter. The train was held up outside Pythiou in Greece by flooding on the tracks. At times the passengers were without heating and, towards the end of the two days' delay, were running short of food and water. The passengers included an elderly American woman, a Hungarian minister and his much younger wife, two shy Danish missionaries, an exuberant Italian, a Bulgarian lady, and one of the directors of the Wagon-Lits Company. Once the train had moved on, it was joined at Belgrade by the king and queen of Serbia, with their entourage.The mixture of nationalities and characters and the enforced delay served as inspiration for the book. The murder itself was based on the real story of the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, which had recently shocked the whole of America and Europe.The book was written in 1933, and was dedicated to Agatha's husband Max Mallowan. The Gate of Baghdad
Parker Pyne Investigates is a collection of detective stories, including 'The Gate of Baghdad'. A group of 12 people are travelling from the Oriental Hotel in Damascus to Baghdad aboard one of the 'huge six-wheeled Pullmans' belonging to the Nairn Transport Company. The journey covers 400 miles of desert, once crossed by camel caravan and now by 'petrol-fed monsters ... in thirty-six hours'. A disparate group of 12 people gathers for the journey, but only ten arrive in Baghdad... Agatha Christie captures the atmosphere and events of a journey she came to know well: the midday halt with lunch from cardboard boxes, the evening stop at the desert fort of Rutbah where a dinner of 'many courses of the tinned variety' is served, the midnight departure so that the party can travel through the night, the inevitable breakdown of the vehicle, and a dawn breakfast of tea and fried sausages.On her first journey east, Agatha reports that she was befriended by a British expatriate wife, whom she does not identify by name. She insisted that Agatha should stay with her and her husband just outside Baghdad. Instead of eastern promise, Agatha found that life in Baghdad with her hosts was disappointingly like her life in England. Determined not to spend time at tea parties and playing tennis, she planned her escape by suggesting an immediate visit to the archaeological site at Ur in southern Iraq. |
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