In 1928, Agatha Christie took her first solo trip abroad, a year after her divorce from Archie Christie. Originally, she planned a trip to the West Indies. But at a supper party two days before her scheduled departure, her friends Katherine and Leonard Woolley convinced her to join them on their dig in Ur, Iraq. Agatha promptly exchanged her ticket and instead boarded the Orient Express to Baghdad.
Two years later, on another trip to Ur, she met Max Mallowan, a young archeologist working for Leonard Woolley. With months, Agatha and Max were married. From then on, Agatha accompanied Max to digs in Mesopotamia.
The Orient Express was Agatha’s favorite and she took many trips aboard the luxury train over the years. These trips inspired one of her most famous novels, Murder on the Orient Express, which culminates in a snowstorm that delays the train by several days. In 1929, the train really was stuck for five days in the snow eighty miles from Istanbul. And in 1931, with Agatha aboard, the train was delayed because the track was flooded. In Agatha’s imagination, these delays became the perfect backdrop to rachet up the tension in her novel.
The plot of the novel was inspired by the infamous and shocking kidnapping of baby Charles Lindbergh Jr. in 1932, when the 20-month-old baby was taken from his bedroom and the famous aviator and his wife paid $50,000 ransom, only to discover that their son was already dead.
The story was first published a year later in six installments in the Saturday Evening Post and titled Murder on the Calias Coach. The novel version was published in 1934.
The Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul has special plaque in the room where they say Agatha Christie stayed when she wrote Murder on the Orient Express.
My novel The Case of the Body on the Orient Express is inspired by Agatha’s first trip on the Orient Express in 1928. It culminates in an exciting show down at the Pera Palace Hotel during an international writers’ conference where Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and their young assistants Eliza Baker and Theo Sharp, are in the line of fire when a would-be assassin comes gunning for a writer threatening to expose his involvement with the Obsidian Cartel, one of the most dangerous gangs in all of Europe.