Hercule Poirot

Hercule Poirot is the book's central character, a world-famous detective who solves the crime and whose presence on the train where the crime takes place causes the criminals to take extra steps to conceal their guilt. Murder on the Orient Express is one of several appearances made by Poirot in mystery novels by this author. In each book, he is portrayed with similar characteristics - among them eccentricity, a capacity for brilliant logic, a passion for order and symmetry, and a penetrating insight into human psychology. All that said, Orient Express contains a vivid example of his most striking characteristic, a combination of compassion and remorselessness, evident in varying degrees in most of the other books in which he appears but most manifest here. He is sympathetic to those who deserve it (such as Ratchett/Cassetti's various victims and those who survive them), coldly unsympathetic to those...