The Plymouth Express Affair

A body on the train. A millionaire’s daughter. Poirot’s little gray cells race against time.

A naval officer boards the Plymouth Express, settles in for a quiet journey, and notices a faint smell of chloroform. He thinks nothing of it—until he tries to shove his suitcase under the seat and finds something blocking the way. A moment later, a cry rings out, the communication cord is pulled, and the great train comes to an unwilling halt in the night.

The victim is Flossie Halliday, the Honourable Mrs. Rupert Carrington, daughter of an American steel millionaire. She was rich, beautiful, and traveling with a hundred thousand dollars' worth of jewels. She is also dead—chloroformed, stabbed, and stuffed under a seat. Her jewel case is missing. Her husband is a gambling-addicted scoundrel who stood to inherit her fortune. Her former flame, a charming French adventurer, has resurfaced. Her maid tells a strange story about a mysterious man in the compartment at Bristol.

Enter Hercule Poirot. He has done work for old man Halliday before. He remembers Flossie as "la jolie petite pensionnaire" from Paris. He also remembers the Count de la Rochefour, "a bad hat" who nearly lured her into a disastrous affair years ago. Halliday wants justice. Poirot wants the truth. He will not leave his armchair. He will not dust for fingerprints. He will sit, arrange his little grey cells, and wait for the facts to arrange themselves into a pattern.

This is Christie at her most economical and cunning. The story barrels along like the train itself, planting clues, misdirecting attention, and building toward a solution that hinges on a single, almost invisible detail—a detail Poirot spots not on the railway line, but in the psychology of a witness.

• First published in The Sketch in April 1923, later collected in Poirot's Early Cases (1974)

• Later expanded by Christie into the full-length novel The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928)

• Adapted into a 1991 episode of Agatha Christie's Poirot starring David Suchet

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A beautifully crafted edition for your shelf, your device, or your ears, or the perfect gift for anyone who knows that the best mysteries are solved not by running around, but by sitting still and thinking.

About the Author

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) was an English crime novelist, short story writer, and playwright, widely regarded as the best-selling novelist of all time. Her works have sold over two billion copies worldwide, outranked only by the Bible and Shakespeare. She created two of the most famous detectives in fiction: the meticulous Belgian Hercule Poirot and the sharp-eyed amateur Miss Jane Marple. The Plymouth Express Affair was written during Christie's creative peak in the early 1920s, the same period that produced The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). She died in 1976 in Wallingford, Oxfordshire.