Agatha Christie Got Stuck on the Orient Express and Turned It Into a Murder Mystery

The luxury train had stopped. First there had been flooding, then the weather turned to a snowstorm, and in the early 1930s Agatha Christie found herself traveling alone and going nowhere on the Orient Express.

She did what a crime writer does. She sat in the dining car and observed the people around her.

That stranded journey became Murder on the Orient Express, probably her most famous book. The book features the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.

The connection is laid out in a show that just opened at the British Library in London. Sophie de France, a curator at the library who helped put together the show on Christie, says the centerpiece for this part of the story is a letter Christie wrote to her husband while she was stuck.

It begins, "Oh, my darling, what a journey." In it, Christie describes the people around her, and those descriptions later reappear as characters in the novel. The exhibition even recreates the train carriages to make the link plain.

It was typical of how she worked. De France says Christie "actually spent a good part of her life in the Middle East working on these archaeological digs," and she borrowed freely from what she saw. A dagger on display in the show, for example, appears in her novel Murder in Mesopotamia.

She had a system, too. Christie wrote in one of her notebooks on display that the building blocks of a classic crime novel are "Who, why, when, how, where and which."

Christie, who later said she never had any real education, taught herself to write and sold more books than any other novelist. Her books, including the Miss Marple stories and the Poirot mysteries, have sold more than two billion copies.

Her great-grandson, James Pritchard, put it simply at the exhibition: she taught herself everything and "didn't do too badly, did it?"