Murder on the Orient Express

The Orient Express leaves Istanbul, and somewhere in the snow of Croatia it stops and cannot move. On board is a dead man. Samuel Ratchett, a shady American businessman, has been stabbed in his compartment, and the blizzard has turned the train into a prison with every passenger inside it. Poirot is one of them.

Ratchett had enemies; that much becomes clear quickly. The passengers each have their story: John Arbuthnot, Mary Debenham, Hector MacQueen, Princess Dragomiroff, Xavier Bouc, the Concierge, and the two lieutenants, Morris and Blanchflower, who assist Poirot. Everyone is lying about something. That is the point of the case, though the scale of the lie takes a while to surface. And the deeper Poirot digs, the more the passengers' neat little biographies start to share a shape.

Stewart Harcourt adapted the novel, and Philip Martin directed. The cast is extraordinary: Toby Jones as Ratchett, David Morrissey as Arbuthnot, Jessica Chastain as Mary Debenham, Brian J. Smith as Hector MacQueen, Eileen Atkins as Princess Dragomiroff, Serge Hazanavicius as Xavier Bouc, with Tristan McShepherd and Sam Crane as the lieutenants.

The solution is famous enough that the ending is common knowledge, and the episode does not pretend otherwise. The pleasure is in the gathering weight: the snow, the faces, the slow accumulation of evidence until Poirot is left with a choice that no amount of logic can make comfortable. Suchet plays that final scene with a weariness that has to be seen. There are versions of this story on film that go for spectacle. This one trusts the book and lets the passengers do the work.

It is the most luxurious of Christie's settings, and the episode makes the most of it: the glamour of the train and the tension of people trapped together in first class. The famous ending lands differently on screen than it does on the page, quieter and sadder, and that is exactly what a good adaptation should do.