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Investigating Agatha Christie's Travel Novels
Some of my favourite Christies are set on modes of transportation. I know I’m not alone in this; Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile are two of the Christie “crown jewels,” after all (set on a train and boat, respectively). And while The Mystery of the Blue Train and Death in the Clouds (train and plane) are slightly less beloved—Christie herself infamously loathed the former—most would agree the settings of these novels are among their best qualities.
Trains, boats, and planes serve a dual purpose in classic, “closed circle” mysteries. They physically isolate their characters, while simultaneously situating them on a trip of some sort. Christie in particular made great use of the inherent uncertainty among fellow travellers: a diverse assortment of strangers thrown together, any one of whom could be lying about their intentions, or their very identities. This is why I consider the transportation novels to be a subset of Christie’s traveling novels overall, which include such gems as Murder in Mesopotamia and Appointment with Death.
But I believe there is a mystery surrounding Christie’s travel novels, which becomes apparent when we consider precisely when she wrote these books. (This sort of exercise has become a habit for me as the host of the podcast All About Agatha, whose original aim was to analyse—and rank!—every single one of Christie’s mystery novels. Together with my late co-host, the eternally missed Catherine Brobeck, I worked through all 66 Christies in publication order. You can check out the results of our efforts here.) Excluding the thrillers, which don’t function as mysteries, almost all of Christie’s travel stories appeared in the early part of her career: a barrage of globe-trotting whodunits starting in the 1920s and continuing steadily through the 1930s, ending with Evil Under the Sun in 1941. The one outlier is A Caribbean Mystery, published in 1964, which I’ll get to in a moment.
Why are the traveling novels so concentrated among the earlier works? One fascinating theory offered by mystery scholar Kate Jackson is that Christie was tapping into the cultural zeitgeist, as she so often did (all pre-conceived notions to the contrary). According to Jackson, there were ten times as many British employees receiving paid annual leave by the end of the 1930s as compared to the 1920s. People in the middle classes, who were often the focal point of Christie’s books (all pre-conceived notions to the contrary), were suddenly traveling in droves.
But this craze never subsided. If anything, travel became more popular—especially during the post-WWII boom of the 1950s and 1960s. So why didn’t Christie maintain her previous pace of stories set abroad or on holiday?
To set forth a theory of my own, I turn to a Christie text that has nothing to do with travel: A Murder is Announced, first published in 1950. And I will call upon the great Miss Jane Marple to make my argument for me.
Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was . . . They were people whose father and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they’d been in the same regiment or served in the same ship as someone there already. If anybody new—really new—really a stranger—came, well, they stuck out—everybody wondered about them and didn’t rest till they found out . . . But it’s not like that any more.
As usual, everything comes into focus viewed under the cool, appraising eye of Miss Marple. Fifteen years earlier, which is to say in the middle of the 1930s, it was helpful if not crucial for a mystery writer in the business of creating convincing whodunits to throw her characters on a boat or plane or trip abroad, for the intrigue that these stories required. But in post-WWII England, this travel element was no longer necessary. Intrigue among strangers had come to roost on the home front, where it would remain for the duration of Christie’s career. Hence books like Hickory Dickory Dock, published in 1955, set among a diverse group of youths in a London hostel. Such a setting would have been impossible—or at least extremely unlikely—twenty or thirty years earlier.
Case closed! And yet, like any amateur sleuth, I have a few alternate theories up my sleeve. One has to do with the proliferation of Poirot novels earlier in Christie’s career. The worldly Poirot loved to travel, and when Christie put him in one of her books, the impulse to send him abroad must have been strong. Nearly two-thirds of the first half of Christie’s canon are Poirot novels, but the little Belgian’s portion of the second half shrinks considerably, to a little over a third, which is precisely when that homebody Miss Marple comes into her own. A Caribbean Mystery is the big outlier here, as already noted, in which Aunt Jane finally gets her big trip abroad, and even lets loose with some retro wisdom: “One really knows so little about the people one meets when one is travelling . . . one only knows, doesn’t one, what they choose to tell you about themselves.” I don’t use the word “retro” lightly here; A Caribbean Mystery is a return to form. Christie scholar John Curran makes the point in Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks that it is the final “pure” whodunit that Christie wrote, and I suspect she enjoyed revisiting familiar ground with this late-career traveling mystery.
My final theory is the simplest, and for this reason it may be the most persuasive. Perhaps Agatha Christie did not write so many traveling mysteries late in her career because she felt that she had done them already, preferring to construct new settings and situations as a way to keep her writing fresh, and her fertile imagination engaged. (In this way, A Caribbean Mystery is once again the exception that proves the rule, which may explain why this perfectly charming novel has never been one of my favourites—relatively speaking, of course!) By the time the Second World War was closing in, Christie had written two train novels, a boat novel, a plane novel, and a multitude of others depicting travellers on various continents. It makes sense that she would choose to shake it up instead of resting on her laurels, even going so far as to use the “closed circle” of a group of tourists in one of her very last novels as a red herring. (Yes, I am being purposely vague here so as not to spoil anything. If you know, you know. And if you don’t know and would like me to tell you, feel free to get in touch.) We can be grateful that Christie poured all her powers of ingenuity into those early transportation novels, and still had so much left to spare.
And fortunately for those of us who love a good mystery abroad, or set on a mode of transportation, there are plenty of authors who come out with novels written in homage to the great Agatha Christie practically every day. I would know. I am one of them, and my latest mystery just so happens to be set entirely on a cruise ship.
About the Author
Kemper Donovan is a bestselling author whose mystery novel, Loose Lips, was released at the end of January 2025. This is the latest instalment in his Ghostwriter Mystery series, which includes 2024's The Busy Body, and a third novel to be released in 2026. He is also the host of the podcast All About Agatha, dedicated to the one and only Agatha Christie, in which guise he has been featured in the L.A. Times, made appearances on BBC TV and Radio New Zealand, and lectured at multiple festivals and conferences. He attended Stanford University and Harvard Law School, and now lives in Southern California with his husband and two daughters.
Loose Lips
The USA Today bestselling host of the All About Agatha podcast injects the spark and fizz of a Golden Age murder mystery into the present-day, as the ghostwriter’s skills are put to the test aboard a bestselling author’s decidedly insalubrious cruise.
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. So goes the adage, but sometimes, even a first-rate ghostwriter and successful mystery author needs to make a buck. Even if that means setting foot on a cruise ship, something she vowed she’d never do. To top it off, the “Get Lit Cruise” is being organized by Payton Garrett, a very popular, bestselling author—and the ghostwriter’s long-time frenemy from back in their MFA days.
Over the years, Payton has reinvented herself. She gained a wife while ditching her journalist husband—who is also on board. And she’s acquired a rabid following who eagerly snapped up the invitations sent to a select few of her newsletter subscribers. The guests, all female, will receive personalized instruction from experts in five different writing genres, while basking in Payton’s reflected glow.
Between mentoring guests, flirting with Payton’s ex, and taking bets on how long before someone performs a reenactment of Titanic’s “I’m flying!” scene (answer: not long enough), there’s plenty to keep a ghostwriter occupied. But there’s one activity nobody expected: solving a murder.
When an attendee is found dead under suspicious circumstances and several others suffer symptoms of poisoning, there are numerous motives and suspects to choose from. But could it be that the victim wasn’t even the intended target? As the body count rises along with onboard tensions, no one is safe—except, perhaps, for a killer whose scruples have long abandoned ship. And of course, like every well-plotted mystery, this one has an extra twist . . .
