I’ve recently read Kelly Oliver’s The Case of the Body on the Orient Express, for a large part set on the Orient Express.

I found that setting so very fascinating.

Well, I generally find the Orient Express fascinating. One of my secret desires is travelling on it at least once in my lifetime 😆

I’ve seen the Orient Express many times, from the outside, when it stops in Verona station. It is beautiful. There’s a charm to it, even if you can’t step inside. Imagine if you could!

Kelly’s story allowed me to vicariously do just that. I loved her descriptions of the train and of life on the train. So I asked her whether she could give us a closer look at that fascinating environment, and she kindly obliged.

This is the article she sent me.

I loved it. What about you?

In 1928, hoping a bold adventure might ease the pain of her divorce from her husband Archie and her beloved mother, Agatha Christie embarked on her first solo journey abroad. At first, she planned to sail for the West Indies. But at a supper party two days before her departure, her friends Leonard and Katharine Woolley convinced her to join them on their archaeological dig at Ur in Mesopotamia. On a whim, Agatha exchanged her ticket and instead boarded the Orient Express bound for Baghdad. Thus began her love of the train that would inspire one of her most famous murder mysteries.

The Orient Express of 1928 was the height of interwar luxury travel. With polished brass, mahogany paneling, and deep-blue enameled carriages, the train was popular with celebrities, aristocrats, and diplomats. Agatha’s first-class sleeping compartment would have been compact but sumptuous with a velvet-upholstered banquette by day that transformed at night into a snug berth with crisp linen, goose-down pillows, and a reading lamp. A small washstand folded down from a cabinet and luggage rested in brass racks overhead. A steward in navy and gold livery would knock softly in the morning, offering coffee and a silver tray of warm rolls and apricot jam.

The dining car gleamed with Art Deco marquetry, white linen, and crystal stemware. Each course arrived with Continental precision with consommé or oysters to start, followed by turbot in cream sauce or roast lamb with duchesse potatoes, ending with cheese, a rich chocolate mousse, or crème caramel. Burgundy and Champagne flowed freely. No two menus were ever the same and the maître d’hôtel could recite the provenance of every wine.

But luxury came with quirks. As Agatha later recalled in her autobiography, even the most elegant fittings couldn’t entirely banish reality of the bedbugs that came out of the woodwork. Even paradise on rails had its inconveniences. But that didn’t bother Agatha, who later thrived in the desert at archeological digs with only the most basic amenities.

In the late 1920s, the Simplon Orient Express route carried travelers from Paris’ Gare de l’Est through Lausanne, Milan, Venice, Belgrade, Sofia, and finally to Istanbul’s Haydarpaşa Station, taking nearly three days. Border crossings brought changes of locomotive, language, and landscape, but not of comfort. The rhythmic clatter of the wheels, the flicker of passing villages, and the scent of coal and snow through the open window all became part of the romance.

From Istanbul, Agatha transferred to the Taurus Express, which carried her through Aleppo and across the Syrian desert to Baghdad—a route few Englishwomen of her time dared to take alone.

Two years later, on another journey to Ur, Agatha met Max Mallowan, a young archaeologist fourteen years her junior, working under Leonard Woolley. Within months they were married and Agatha became a fixture on archaeological digs across Mesopotamia. She would later call her years in Iraq among the happiest of her life. Some of her anecdotes about her life in the desert inspired my third Detection Club Mystery, which will be out early next year.

The Orient Express remained Agatha’s favorite way to travel. The line’s reputation for luxury, and occasional mishap, offered irresistible inspiration. In 1929 the train was stranded for five days in snowdrifts near Çerkezköy, Turkey, and in 1931, when Agatha herself was aboard, floodwaters delayed the trip for twenty-four hours. These real events fermented in her imagination, transforming into the snowbound suspense of Murder on the Orient Express.

The novel’s central crime was inspired by the 1932 kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr., the 20-month-old son of the famous aviator. Agatha wove the immobilized train and the stolen child into a single claustrophobic mystery that tested the morality of criminal justice. The story first appeared in 1933 in The Saturday Evening Post under the title Murder on the Calais Coach and was published as a novel the following year. A favorite of Christie fans, it combines the mysteries of travel with the lingering effects of tragedy.

Agatha wrote parts of Murder on the Orient Express at The Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul, a haven for travelers on the Orient Express at the journey’s end. The hotel still honors Agatha with a plaque in Room 411. The hotel’s grand marble staircase and wrought-iron elevator could easily have featured in one of her plots as an opulent setting for secrets, spies, and whispered betrayals.

The second novel in my Detection Club Mystery series, The Case of the Body on the Orient Express, is inspired by Agatha’s first trip aboard that legendary train in 1928—along with a secret her fellow Detection Club writer Dorothy L. Sayers took to her grave.

My homage to Christie culminates in a tense showdown at the Pera Palace Hotel during an international writers’ conference, where Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and their young assistants Eliza Baker and Theo Sharp find themselves in the line of fire as a would-be assassin targets a writer threatening to expose his ties to the Obsidian Cartel—one of the most dangerous gangs in Europe.

Join Eliza and Theo and Agatha and Dorothy on the journey of a lifetime aboard the Orient Express.

Paris, 1928: Agatha Christie and fellow writer Dorothy L Sayers board the Orient Express, bound for Constantinople. But before the duo can settle in to enjoy the luxuries of their first-class journey, their journey is derailed when a fellow guest drops dead during the dinner service. And as the last person to speak to the victim, Dorothy finds herself a prime suspect in his murder.

As the train hurtles East, Sayers’ resourceful assistant Eliza and her friend Theo must navigate a maze of suspects. But with each passing mile, the stakes rise, and when another body is discovered.

Can Eliza and Theo stay one step ahead, crack the mystery and clear Dorothy’s name? Or will this be one journey too far for the amateur sleuths?

Discover more on Kelly’s Website