43 pages • 1 hour read
Agatha ChristieA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
The book opens with the third-person narrator introducing the hero of the story: famed detective Hercule Poirot. Poirot is in Syria, waiting for the Taurus Express train; he was in Aleppo to solve a case. Poirot boards the train and finds two other people sharing his compartment: a young British governess, Mary Debenham, in her late twenties, and an older English Colonel in his forties or fifties, Colonel Arbuthnot. Mary and Colonel Arbuthnot have breakfast together but don’t invite Poirot to join them. Poirot notices the way that Colonel Arbuthnot looks over him and reads the man’s view upon Poirot, a Belgian, to mean, “Only some damned foreigner” (9).
Later, Poirot overhears Mary and the Colonel having a curious conversation: When the Colonel tries to speak to Mary, she tells him, “Not now. Not now. When it’s all over. When it’s behind us—then—” (11). Poirot doesn’t realize it yet, but Mary is referring to the impending murder of another passenger on the Orient Express—the train that Poirot, Mary, and Colonel Arbuthnot will all board when they reach Istanbul.
By Agatha Christie
A Murder Is Announced
A Murder Is Announced
Agatha Christie
And Then There Were None
And Then There Were None
Agatha Christie
A Pocket Full of Rye
A Pocket Full of Rye
Agatha Christie
Crooked House
Crooked House
Agatha Christie
Death On The Nile
Death On The Nile
Agatha Christie
Murder at the Vicarage
Murder at the Vicarage
Agatha Christie
Poirot Investigates
Poirot Investigates
Agatha Christie
The ABC Murders
The ABC Murders
Agatha Christie
The Mousetrap
The Mousetrap
Agatha Christie
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Agatha Christie
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Agatha Christie
The Pale Horse
The Pale Horse
Agatha Christie
Witness for the Prosecution
Witness for the Prosecution
Agatha Christie
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