The Mystery of the Blue Train
A strangled heiress, a missing ruby and the Blue Train to the Riviera.
The Mystery of the Blue Train is a Hercule Poirot novel by Agatha Christie, first published in the United Kingdom on 29 March 1928. It concerns the murder of an American heiress on Le Train Bleu, the "Blue Train" bound for the French Riviera.
Quick Facts
- Translator
- Mystery
- Author
- Agatha Christie
- Cover artist
- C. Morse (pseudonym of Salomon van Abbé)
- Country
- United Kingdom
- Language
- English
- Series
- Hercule Poirot
- Publisher
- William Collins & Sons
- Released
- 29 March 1928
Lore & Background
On board, Katherine Grey meets Ruth Kettering, an American heiress leaving her unhappy marriage to meet her lover. The next morning Ruth is found strangled in her compartment, and the famous ruby "Heart of Fire", recently given to her by her father, is missing. Her father, the American millionaire Rufus Van Aldin, and his secretary, Major Knighton, persuade Poirot to take the case. Suspicion falls on her lover, the Comte de la Roche, and then on her estranged husband, Derek Kettering, who is arrested.
Reader's Guide
Poirot recreates the journey and reveals that Ruth's maid, Ada Mason, is really Kitty Kidd, a male impersonator and actress, and that the murderer and Mason's accomplice is Knighton, who is really the jewel thief known as "the Marquis". The cigarette case marked "K" stood for Knighton, not Kettering. Christie later wrote that she "had to force myself" to write the book. The plot is based on the 1923 Poirot short story "The Plymouth Express".
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