Reading Glasses - Fan Group discussion

Use this post to discuss the book as a whole!

Alright, is anyone else finished, or is it just me?

Chrissy wrote: "Alright, is anyone else finished, or is it just me?"

Nope, I decided this was not a book to be read slowly and just powered through to the end.

It's been quite a while since I read the book, but I remember being intensely disappointed by it.

One thing I recall was that Poirot's investigation felt interminable. It was just suspects saying over and over that they didn't see anything, with minute differences of detail. Yes, sure, that Poirot manages to recognize the differences is Very Impressive, but the experience of wading through all those is excruciating.

And the other thing is, I found the ending terrifically disappointing. Poirot's leap of "If none of them could have done it alone, all of them must have done it together" is nonsensical. It could have been just a few of them conspiring, or there could be some whole other thing going on. It only works since you known it's a mystery book; since you know there's a solution; and, since Christie tells you Poirot's ruled out everything else.
Why, imagine any other mystery book where the detective is temporarily stumped. Imagine that detective going, "Well, I'm stumped, none of them seems to have done it." Would it make one iota of sense for that detective to conclude, "Aha! Then they must have all done it together!" That's about the level of sense I'm feeling from this "deduction."

There are other Christie books I enjoyed a whole lot. This one seems to me like its popularity is due to something of a gimmick -- and I don't think it's a gimmick that's held up through near-80 years of mystery writing.

Okay, so I've taken some time to get my thoughts in order about this book. Overall, it just wasn't for me.

My biggest issue was that Poirot was just irritating in his smug superiority. And with this story in particular we can't leave him. Because of the conclusion to the mystery the reader can not be allowed to see other character from any point of view but Poirot's. We can't see them interact among themselves because that would give everything away. But it also would have been so much more interesting.

I'd actually be much more interested in a telling of this story that focuses on the involved passengers and their attempts to trick the smug investigator.

I'd actually be much more interested in a telling of this story that focuses on the involved passengers and their attempts to trick the smug investigator.

Ohhhh! That'd be BRILLIANT.

I came in here expecting to be the only one disappointed with this book, but I see that I'm actually in the majority of comments so far. I enjoyed the ending well enough, I thought it was clever and satisfying, but most of the book I found to be rather dull and at times a slog to get through, despite its short length.

It felt so redundant at times, with Poirot constantly calling in each passenger, asking them each the same questions, having them all deny any knowledge of everything, over and over and over again. Then other chapters had Poirot literally reviewing lists of the passengers and the evidence against them (all of which we were already aware of).

While I think Standback raises some good points about how unrealistic some of the leaps Poirot made are, I still found the ending enjoyable enough. Though honestly, I thought it was telegraphed a little bit once they started to reveal that EVERYBODY on the train had some connection to the Armstrongs. Obviously that's not going to end up a coincidence in the end. I tend to agree with Standback that this book probably wouldn't be as well-remembered if not for the gimmicky ending.

This is my first Agatha Christie book, and I have a question for anyone who has read her other works: given that I didn't particularly enjoy this one, would there be any point to me reading others by her? Or will I likely find them all equally underwhelming?

Colin wrote: "Though honestly, I thought it was telegraphed a little bit once they started to reveal that EVERYBODY on the train had some connection to the Armstrongs. Obviously that's not going to end up a coincidence in the end."

The thing is, that's kind of a standard trope for murder mysteries. They start out all "oh this is so mysterious who could possibly have done this," and then the detective gradually uncovers how almost everybody has a motive or a secret -- which ups tension and suspense, and keeps the mystery strong.

(A lot of stories start right from "everybody has a motive, the killer could have been any of these ten people"; same same.)

That's a lot of what annoys me in this deduction. "All these people have a motive" is just so prevalent in the genre, that making that the suspicious element (without some serious, serious buildup) feels like it undercuts every locked-room mystery story out there :-/

It's like if you said "Hey, this Poirot guy always seems on-hand when there's some super-devious murdering going on. Wouldn't Occam's Razor say that most likely Poirot's actually a serial killer who's gotten cozy with the police, and is really good at BS'ing complex stories explaining how the killer is always some totally unexpected person?".

Yessss, the mystery genre is inherently absurd and doesn't work Like Real Life Does -- but if you start using "This is not Like Real Life" as clue in a murder mystery, you're chopping off the branch you're sitting on.

(Standback has STRONG FEELINGZ abt unsatisfying mystery resolutions, rawr!)

Standback wrote: "The thing is, that's kind of a standard trope for murder mysteries. They start out all "oh this is so mysterious who could possibly have done this," and then the detective gradually uncovers how almost everybody has a motive or a secret -- which ups tension and suspense, and keeps the mystery strong."

No, I get all that, and that's fine. I'm just saying I didn't think it was particularly well executed in this case. It's all well and good for a murder mystery to gradually reveal clues and evidence and motive, all building up to a big reveal. What I'm saying is once they started showing that literally everyone on the train was a member or associate of the Armstrong family, it became pretty clear that it was some sort of conspiracy involving all of them, but the book was still in the stage where it was revealing clues and building up the mystery. So that diffused some of the tension for me.

I feel like Christie is sort of playing with the conventions of the genre here. Like, the people who are noting that it's kind of a big giveaway that everyone on the train is connected to the murder victim are correct -- but, on the other hand, people who had been reading a ton of cheap murder mysteries, including some of Christie's earlier work, would be aware that this type of book often contained some pretty ridiculous coincidences, which the reader was just supposed to swallow. So the meta-mystery is: Is this a meaningful clue, or just bad writing? If the former, what will it mean?

Her first book was published in 1920, her last was published shortly after her death in 1976, and I think that by 'The Murder of Roger Ackroyd' in 1926, and maybe earlier, one of the things she liked to do is identify unnamed rules of the genre and subvert them. The general expectation of the reader is: You have a murder, and you have a restricted number of suspects. Through a convoluted sequence of events, most of the suspects are eliminated, though sometimes some of the people who were eliminated early on are shown to be possibilities again and come in for new inspection. At the end, the detective reveals the killer (singular, though occasionally you run into a murderer with an accomplice). So most of the readers would have been conditioned to think, 'Who is the killer', rather than, 'Oh, they're all in it together'. The ideal would perhaps be for the reader to catch on maybe a chapter before then end (when, in this case, Poirot starts summoning people, describing their connection to the killer, and dismissing them, often in just a few sentences) -- or maybe to never catch on and just be along for the ride.

Anyway, all of the above is probably obvious, and I am spending too much time on it. But I just wanted to note that I don't necessarily think that the solution to this was as obvious to readers at the time of publishing as it might seem now.

One thing I like about the last chapter: Poirot says he'll give two possible solutions, then gives a short one that satisfies nobody, then embarks on the actual solution; and, by the end of it, I had completely forgotten about the first solution. So the fact that the 'official' answer is taken to be the first, fake, solution was a nice twist ending that I remember enjoying on first reading.