Why do we scare ourselves?

My mother tried to raise kids who didn't know fear.  I think she must have experienced some very bad moments in her own childhood because she understood the nature of childhood terrors and did her best to keep me and my sister from everything scary.  Our TV shows were monitored, our movie choices screened and Mom made sure that the books we read could never frighten or intimidate us.  All of this careful planning had a funny result: we grew up scared of a lot of things and although my sis recovered fairly quickly, (she's far braver than I am)  it takes me some extra work to get past the terror on the screen and in fiction. I work at this because I don't want to miss something good, just because it is disturbing but sometimes I have to ask (as my Mom must have before every Halloween and roller-coaster), "Why do we like to be scared?"

The wish to be frightened is part of Halloween tradition but this goes back a lot further than a "Haunted-House-for-Charity" (think about this: these days, we get startled out of our wits in order to give money to a worthy cause.  Must we be terrorized into generosity?)  Authors have been scaring us for a living for centuries.  So, did scary stories like The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho become popular in the 1700's because printing presses were available to print them or had our lives become so civilized by then that we needed a frisson of fright in order to stay interested in life?

A friend of mine thinks it has something to do with endorphins.  Terror involves a kind of excitement and surviving a scare often creates a mild euphoria so riding the roller coaster or paging through a tense thriller makes you feel good, especially when the hero/heroine triumphs instead of dies.  Because the reader is never actually in danger, he or she gets the benefit of the endorphin rush without the trauma of the actual experience. 

 (One reason I love the Tony Hill/Carol Jordan thrillers is that the author, Val McDermid, never discounts the trauma.  Her heroes face grave dangers and usually prevail but each experience leaves its own scars and trauma.  Nobody battles monsters and comes away untouched.)  I think endorphins may play a role but I think there is something more.

We live in a fearsome world, where atrocities are perpetrated that defy explanation.  Sometimes, just examining these disasters is more than we can bear or understand. Nevertheless we still need, emotionally, to examine and understand these acts in order to put them in perspective. So we write and read horror stories where the monsters often have a background story that allows us to comprehend their motives and, eventually, overcome the antagonist.  Monsters seldom prevail in these stores.  Someone else gains control and the "bad guy: is subdued.  Scary stories, frightening as they are, tell us things will ultimately come out all right.  The monster will be stopped. Some hero will take control. A version of life will go on.  These are comforting thoughts.  Maybe we read scary stories to tell ourselves that terror is transitory and life will (eventually) be okay. Ultimately, control will be re-established.

Whether it's for the feeling of excitement or a sense of control, we continue to read and create scary stories.  If you like them, this is the time to celebrate them.  If not, find a nice copy of something comforting and hide out for the next week or so.  Different stories will come along.  Everything will be OK.

That Terrible, Really-Bad, House

It's Halloween Season again and TV channels, movies, radio and much of the internet are paying tribute to this time by retelling the stories that entertain and scare us.  The traditional cast of characters are all on display: witches, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, zombies and other dead\undead players that make things go bump in the night.  I like most of these but they don't terrify me.  Haunted homes come closer to the mark since the atavistic part of my brain gives credence to these tales.  It's easy to believe homes absorb the emotions of the residents they protect and impressions of the events they witnessed. Still, because this type of haunting make sense, in the end they really don't really frighten me either. These are traumatized buildings with PTSD and it's obvious they need therapy. However, there is a sub-group of the haunted house that doesn't follow this pattern. These are the houses that go bad without reason or rhyme. These sentient, "born bad" buildings prey on inhabitants for their own malevolent reasons.  There aren't many novels that fit in this category but one of the greatest is The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.  It can make you distrust your own house.

The story starts simply enough.  Eleanor Vance is a single woman in the twentieth century who has never had a life of her own.  After childhood, she cared for a dying mother until her parent died; then she moved into her sister's home.  Eleanor has never had a job, or friends, and her family barely tolerates her.  Because of a strange phenomena Eleanor experienced as a child, she's been invited for a short stay at Hill House, an uninhabited country home.  Dr. Montague, the man behind the invitation, thinks she can have an effect on the house.

An odd group of people have answered Dr. Montague's invitation to stay, but Hill House is even odder.  Everything in the house is off kilter, from the angle of the interior walls to the shades of color in each of the rooms. Because the wall angles are all distorted, the house isn't laid out in a traditional way.  Some rooms can only be accessed through other rooms, upper rooms don't sit squarely over the lower ones and doors seem to close by themselves. Things disappear too easily in Hill House and voices come from unaccountable places but once there, Eleanor doesn't want to leave - frightening as it is, Hill House is the first place where she's given respect or kindness and she is loath to relinquish that treatment or her feeling of independence.  Eventually, Eleanor has to choose between returning to her unhappy life of sanity or keeping an illusion of freedom by remaining in the hellish Hill House.

Hill House succeeds because it exploits our love of hearth and home to create its underlying horror. Home is our port of refuge, our shelter against the world.  Whether it's an apartment, a cottage or a sixty-room mansion, "home" is the place we can shed our defenses and simply be ourselves, vulnerable inside these constructed shells.  This is why we describe houses in nurturing terms, the way we would describe caring parents.  In this metaphor, the mortise and bricks of Hill House carry the DNA of a psychopath for as its author stated,

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."

We expect our homes to be well constructed and quiet; we fantasize they are sentient and kind.  In other words, we think of our homes the way we'd like to be thought of ourselves. That's why homelessness is more than a financial calamity; it erodes identity and peace of mind. After you enjoy  the Halloween festivities this year, think of how safe you feel in your home and say a prayer for those less fortunate.  They walk among us every day, looking for shelter, love and respect. In their eagerness to find a home, some will disregard the obvious warning signs and enter distorted, unsafe spaces.  When that happens, the spirit of Hill House will claim yet another victim, then continue to walk on alone.

Reading in Foolish Ways and Places

There's nothing like cleaning up a seldom-used room for turning up forgotten photographs.  A small pile of candid shots were dislodged as I was re-shelving some books  and drifted toward the rug. My husband picked up this one and handed it back to me with a smile saying, "Is there a reason I never see you read while you're sitting in a chair?  No, there probably isn't  except that after thirty years of marriage, he should know that reading isn't a chair-limited activity to me.  In fact, some of my best reading is in unlikely places.

I am grateful no photos exist of me reading in the tub but that's not from lack of opportunity.  Tub-reading has always seemed like the height of luxury to me, since it combines words with relaxing in water.  Of course it requires skill to keep the water-soluble print from the H2O (especially if shampoo is involved) but this is one I hone with regular practice.  Outside of this, the only difficulty with tub-reading depends on the hot water supply.  In a good scene, there is never enough.

I have been known to read in the car although never as a driver while the vehicle was in motion.  (That's my story, Officer, and I'm sticking to it.)  As a passenger, reading a traditional format book over the bumps and turns usually gave me motion sickness and I avoided car-reading for years.  E-readers have solved that problem, although I couldn't say why, and audiobooks are a blessing but there are times when a traditional book must be read and a car is the only option.  Once was the 16th of July, 2005, the night Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was published.  Like so many, I had fallen in love with J. K. Rowling's creation and set aside my phobia of crowds to pick up the novel at its midnight release.  Once the bells rang at midnight, the bunch of us surged to purchase our books and then out in the parking-lot, green and purple volumes clutched to our chests.  Parents boosted over-excited and tired children into car-seats, fastened seat belts and peeled out of the parking lot. Exhausted book-sellers closed up the store.  Everyone was eager to get back to comfort, except me.  I sat in my Jeep with the windows rolled down and the interior light on, reading the first chapter while I slapped at marauding mosquitoes.  Only after I knew how the story began could I drive the twenty miles towards home.

In the end, the need to find a place to read is more about word-addiction than site.  To plow through a 250 page story on a smart phone screen that only shows 32 words at a time shows the same demented focus as reading during a migraine with a hand clapped over one eye - the damn fool reader doesn't know when or how to put the book down.  Well, that's me, guilty on both counts.  So if you see some dare-devil risking his or her life with their face stuck in a book, feel a little compassion.  That's not a risk-taker enjoying the setting, just one more fool addicted to words.

The Elements of Revenge Lit.

Every art form has rules.  Some forms, like the Elizabethan sonnet, specify the number and emphasis of beats in a line and lines in a verse.  Other forms operate under dicta that (to borrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean script) function more like guidelines.  I'm not sure how formalized the rules are in Revenge Stories but I can tell you one thing about Andrew Hilbert's Death Thing.  It has the elements of this genre down pat.

• A Recognizable Protagonist - Gilbert is one of life's constant complainers, a fellow the rest of us have met and now try to avoid.  He's the self-satisfied old guy spouting opinions on every subject, and insults with every remark.  If he's your relative, you duck him at family gatherings and wonder on the way home why and how his wife stays in their marriage. Like many retirees, Gilbert has too much time on his hands and booze in his gut but the man does have a legitimate problem: vandals have been breaking into his car.  Rather than keep his auto in the garage or take his valuables inside when he leaves, Gilbert opts to turn his car into a machine that will "teach" the criminal element to leave his stuff alone.  Of course, the lesson will teach Gilbert much more in the end. 

• Everyone who Stays, Pays - Have you noticed something about these kind of stories? 
  
  The vengeance is always out of proportion to the injury and every character in the story gets clobbered, the innocent as well as the guilty.  Gilbert's "trap" works on the vandals as planned, then it works in ways the inventor hadn't imagined.  FYI: if you don't like stories with gore, look elsewhere on the shelf.  But, before you put this one down unread, consider point #3.

• Horror works well with Humor.  An audience needs to let off tension at times. That's why the drunken porter takes the stage after Macbeth murders the King. and why there are jokes in the early part of Jaws.  Hilbert serves up a side-dish of funny in parts of the Death Thing, including a scene where Gilbert tries to teach his wife the tricks of driving a booby-trapped car.  He's nervous, she's oblivious and their drive-through attendant is about to learn the perils of arguing with a customer.  

• There is a lesson behind it all.  Along with a cast of cartoonish characters, Death Thing speaks of an alienated society, where property is valued over people and no one heeds a cry for help, not even the 911 operator.  Instead, the understaffed, corruptible police advise their suspects, "anything you say or do doesn't really matter", (a depressing statement no one but the audience hears) and an old man eventually regrets he chose lethal action over a Neighborhood Watch.  Of course, the reader knows those choices can become one and the same in the end.  Death Thing may be a story of extremist characters and scenes but it's within shouting distance of the truth and that may be the tale's most disturbing point.

Blunt, gory, funny and sometimes thought provoking, Death Thing is a book for October.

Getting Help with Ye Olde Classics

It's no secret that I'm addicted to reading.  I started staring at printed pages before I learned to walk and I was pulling the meaning from them before I could tie my shoes so reading was never hard.   Want to hear a secret? Reading the Classics, those old, required plays and poems was hard for me, at first.  My eyes, trained for the fast-paced, economic sentences of the twentieth century, stopped dead at Elizabethan verse and Middle English. Now,  professors tend to look down on would-be English Majors who can't discuss Shakespeare and Chaucer, so I had to resolve the issue.  You could say I got a lot of help.  I'd prefer to think of it as cheating.

The Canterbury Tales

Take enough English classes and eventually you'll bump up against Chaucer's famous tales.  The premise is simple.  A bunch of religious travelers meet at a pub and amuse each other through the evening by telling stories.  The problem is, they're speaking in Middle English, which has, at best, a nodding acquaintance with our type of palaver.  As an example, I'll give you the start of my favorite, The Miller's Tale:

Whilom ther was dwellynge at oxenford

A riche gnof, that gestes heeld to bord,

And of his craft he was a carpenter.  

With hym ther was dwellynge a poure scoler,

Hadde lerned art, but al his fantasye

Was turned for to lerne astrologye,

Now the way to get through this thicket is to remember these Tales were written to be read aloud.  They're performance pieces.   Sound the words out and what do you get?

There was dwelling at Oxenford
A rich "Gnof" that boarded guests.
He was a carpenter.
With him was a poor student that had learned art
but whose fantasy was to study astrology.

That's close enough to the modern translation to keep going.  There are only two warnings I should give about reading The Tales out loud.  First off, sounding those words out loud sounds a little funny at first so try to do this by yourself.  Second, you should know Chaucer had a bawdy sense of humor.  There are parts of the Miller's Tale that still make me laugh out loud while I blush.  So, if you must read this to somebody, pick a friend you cannot be embarrassed around.  Now let's get on to the next part of the lesson.

Shakespeare (Without Tears)

Breathes there a student so well-read

Who never to himself has said, 

"Why do I have to read this crap?"

My apologies to Sir Walter Scott for stealing his rhyme scheme but we all have been bored by the Bard at some point.   Bill wrote some dandy plays, all right, but the speeches are written as verse and they're heavy texts.  No one has short lines in Shakespeare.  Every sentence is full of allusions and metaphors (the reason other authors keep reusing his lines as their book titles) and it's damned hard to catch all the references when they're on the page, staring back at you.  So make it easy on yourself.  Don't read the lines at first, listen to them.  Listen and watch someone performing them, preferably an actor with the chops to bring out the references.  Take a gander at the video below from one of Canada's best exports ever, "Slings and Arrows" and you'll see what I mean:

Did you get the question in the front?  If Hamlet's aware of the men behind the curtain, his speech is to make them believe he's nuts (when he's not).  If he isn't aware of them, then our prince is dangerously depressed.  You can't get that from reading the text but it does bring options to an actor's performance.  Bill's plays are performance art and a skillful production can bring out more meaning than any flat page.

Introduce yourself to material in the format it was meant for and then go over it with your script.  You'll be amazed how the work comes to life.   And if someone compliments you on your understanding of the classics, just smile and duck your head.  No needs to know that you had help.  That secret stays between us cheaters.

Something Real to Fear in the Fall

We like to scare ourselves with autumn stories.  Whether the celebration is Halloween, Guy Fawkes Day, or Dia de Los Muertos, this is the season when we remember that life is chancy and death is real.  Because these truths are frightening, most of us arrange our lives to minimize danger and invent spooky stories for fun.   It took Sebastian Junger to remind us that some folks still earn a living doing hazardous work and watch the skies of October with fear. Those who live by and on the sea never forget that hurricanes arrive with the fall. The Perfect Storm is an account of a Halloween storm that  landlubbers will never forget.

Two dozen years have passed since a low-pressure system hit the remnants of Hurricane Grace and turned it into a sea-going cyclone.  Three people outside watching the storm were swept away by the winds and two more died when their boat sank off Staten Island.  A Coast-Guard helicopter crashed in the storm and one of the paratroopers was lost at sea but if you ask readers about that storm, they'll tell you about the fishing ship, Andrea Gail.  They may even remember the names of her crew, because of this book.

 

In recounting the last voyage of  the Andrea Gail, Junger gives readers an up-close, respectful view of the fishermen who work hard in hazardous places and the needs that drive them.  These are the people, in a service economy, who still work with their hands.  Their jobs are demanding, the workplace is hazardous, the pay uncertain and there are no 401Ks but sometimes the money is good, incredibly good.  So, to give their children and themselves the same options as other Americans, these men bet their lives on a boat, hoping they'll pull in a line full of fish.

While this is the center of the tale, Junger answers the other questions that occur while reading this story.  How do they build boats to stay aloft on the waves?  Was the A. G. a sea-worthy vessel?  How did fishing grow beyond a coastal industry?  Were any other vessels involved in the storm  and (sadly) what happens as somebody drowns.  The Perfect Storm researches and answers these and dozens of other related questions so the book seems sometime like either a very long well-researched article suitable for the "National Geographic" or (to its detractors) a master's thesis with a riveting narrative line.

The book eventually made more news than the storm that created it and the results have been put to good use.  Mr. Junger created a foundation to help the children of industrial fishermen get the education they need.  The popularity of the book and film adaptation gave birth to a spate of reality shows about people who do hazardous work, especially in the commercial fishing industry.  Technology improves some aspects of fishing. The crew of the Andrea Gail are not forgotten.

Still, the ocean and the wind can seem bewitched in October and the list of lost mariners at the Fisherman's Memorial in Gloucester continues to grow. As long as someone pays for work that can only be done on the water, someone else will take the job while their family waits and prays for a safe return. The Perfect Storm shows inland dwellers who "love" the sea we are lucky we don't really know it.  Instead, we should respect those who do and keep our Halloween stories to ourselves.  Fishing families already have enough ghosts.

Now let us Praise Banned Books

It's Banned Books Week again, that week cherished by bibliophiles and lovers of intellectual freedom, a time when the stupidity and bigotry of would-be censors is exposed to the light of day. Granted, a small part enjoying of BBW comes from a feeling of coalition; it's nice to meet others who prize big ideas over small minds but the core of the celebration are the books themselves. Banned Books  are some of the best stories in the world.

When I first heard Americans were banning books, I was a teenager and my personal library was kept on one shelf.  At the time, I was amazed that anyone in the USA endorsed censorship, especially after after WWII (why copy any policy approved of by Hitler?)  The real surprise came when I read which books folks had wanted to ban:  Alice In Wonderland?  To Kill A Mockingbird?  The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds?  Were they kidding? Almost every book on my shelf (and all of my favorites) had been a target for censorship at some point.

I also noticed titles that were not on the list.  One of families that I baby-sat for kept a collection of paperbacks in the living room that, shall we say, were not to my taste.  Not your standard coffee table fare (although that's where they were kept).  None of those titles were on the challenged book list.  Now, I don't want to control anyone else's reading material but I couldn't understand the rationale. Why would be book-banners ignored the neighbor's volume of "Loving Family" (if you can't guess the plot lines, you don't want to know) and pick on my Catcher In The Rye?

I heard a lot of canned remarks about parental concerns and impressionable minds whenever I asked this question but campaigns against specific books still didn't make any sense when I looked at the challenged material and the specifics of the parental concerns.  It took some thinking but I think I've found the real reason specific books get some folks looking for matches.  The reason isn't sex or drugs, violence or rock-n-roll.   Books get challenged when they contain material that gets the reader to think.

An uneducated boy and a runaway slave become the moral conscience in a story where the "civilized" humans promote racism, mob rule and a level of gullibility that should make humanity blush. At the climax of the book, the boy denies the values he's been taught and decides to help the slave find freedom, even if it costs the kid his soul.  Turning your back on society is an outrageous idea.

Another young man decides he won't sell school candy and sticks to his decision even though he's persecuted for it and his actions "disturb the universe."  Not following the herd is a dangerous glamorous idea for any teenager to entertain.

After years of physical, emotional and sexual abuse, a downtrodden black woman discovers her own voice and value and makes a life of herself.  That concept's downright revolutionary.  

In a way, getting challenged has become literature's contrary seal of approval.  It means the work is so polished and stimulating that someone fears a reader may understand it. Fear of understanding is why the censor says, "This you may not think; this you may not know." Shirley Jackson knew this when she heard her story, "The Lottery" had been banned in South Africa.  She said the ban proved the country understood her story, an allegory that shows how evil becomes invisible when it's incorporated into the culture.  Houston, Texas also got the point because they pulled The Lottery off of bookshelves two years ago.*  If there's ritualized evil in Texas, they want to make sure no school child can spot it.  

*http://www.aclutx.org/2013/09/22/17th-annual-banned-book-report/; https://secure.txla.org/secure/public/tljonline/TLJFall13.pdf

In Orbit too Close to a Star

Our culture celebrates accomplished people, especially accomplished creative artists.  This means many celebrities have more of a "fish-bowl" kind of existence than a personal life and they often require a small army of helpers to meet all of their personal and professional obligations.  These Assistants can start out as an artist's devoted fans or followers but their work and the trust of their employer gives them a view behind the curtain others don't get to see: they know the artist on and off stage, see the creative person as well as his/her public persona.  Whether that is an advantage or disadvantage is explored in Lynn Cullen's novel, Twain's End.

The book is a fictionalization of a real drama that occurred during the last year of Samuel Clemens's (aka Mark Twain's) life.  Over the previous decade, the person who managed his correspondence and everyday responsibilities was a woman named Isabel Lyon.  The writer relied on his secretary so much that Clemens had given her a house close his own and a bedroom in his estate, Stormfield.  When Miss Lyon married the writer's business manager in 1909, Mr. Clemens attended their wedding but before the newlyweds returned from their honeymoon, Clemens had fired both of them, on grounds of embezzlement.

Now, this wouldn't have been more than a blip on the radar of Mark Twain scholars if the story had stopped there.  Instead, Clemens then effectively sued his former secretary and forced her to return the  house he had deeded to her years before.  Still not content, he wrote to all their mutual friends, calling Isabel everything except a Child of God and turned more than four hundred pages of his mammoth autobiography (released in 2010) is a vicious attack on her character.  Isabel Lyon Ashcroft denied the charges of theft but never said anything against her former employer, even after his death.  Using Mark Twain's papers and Ms. Lyon's diaries, Lynn Cullen constructs a compelling account of the complex relationship between this celebrity and his assistant that shows what happens when the boundaries between personal and professional relationships crumble.

What happens to celebrated personalities once declining health limits access to their adoring public?  If your guide is the biographies of Twain and Dickens, it seems that the drama and applause the performer craves must be re-created in their homes, either by their nearest and dearest (whose ties are to the real person rather than the performing alter-ego) or by assistants and hand-picked fans and unhealthy rivalries develop between the chosen.  Ms. Cullen's novel suggests that something like this rivalry also occurred in life of Helen Keller, a Twain fan and celebrated personality herself.  Miss Keller's teacher and constant companion, Annie Sullivan married a man who became attracted to her student and a unhealthy rivalry developed between the two woman as well as the husband and wife. In the end, Miss Sullivan's marriage broke from the stress of the twin rivalries. 

Lynn Cullen

It is the rivalries that steer the tension in Twain's End, and the need of isolated souls that keeps the reader coming back for more.   In the end, Miss Cullen's novel transforms the caricatures of famous celebrities back into the people they were before public personas smothered the nuance and subtlety of their human creators.  Behind the performing mask that the public sees is a complex and often fearful human being and humanity can be very appealing.  In the end, that humanity may be what keeps some assistants in orbit around  their stars.

The novel, Twain's End, by Lynn Cullen will be released on October 13, 2015.  I am very grateful to Net Galley for releasing a pre-publication copy to me for this review.  LLG

The Tales of Autumn

Fall is unequivocally here, on the calendar and in the air.  Daytime highs are comfortably lower, nights are longer and the primary religion here has changed to college football.  The leaves are just beginning to turn and fall but there are some early spots of color.  Everything is changing along with the books we're choosing - there's nothing quite like autumn reading.











Perhaps it comes from the years we all spent in school, but autumn is the season when we reach for meaningful books, for stories that bring something with them besides primary characters and plot.  History, both fictional and non-fiction, become more relevant in this season since autumn reminds us that time is passing.  A new generation is starting school, while another has reached maturity and still another is passing on.  After a summer of living in the moment, fall is a good time to reflect on life and to find your place in the scheme of things.  

That doesn't mean autumn tales are lacking in story.  The greatest holiday for stories, Halloween, is in the middle of fall and reams of words surround it.  Everything about Halloween stirs the imagination from elaborate costumes (Come As You're Not Parties)...


 




 ...to the belief that a point of the earth's orbit thins the membrane between life and death until it becomes permeable.   All kinds of things can happen in the world like that and there are stories for every possibility.  There's a reason so many writers love Halloween.  It's a holiday composed of memory and imagination.
 

More than anything, autumn is a time of gathering in, for the harvest and for the soul, a time when an evening's chill can make a good book and a warm fire the best company in the believable world.  Fall may not contain the same verve that drove spring and summer but there's a generosity here that favors and enriches the season.  Here is the welcome of hearth and home and loving friends, real and in fiction.  Enjoy this gold-spangled season and the tales that it offers.  They are wondrous to behold.

Subversive Lit on the Orient Express

Teachers tell us  we have to study the classics in order to understand literary forms.  For tragedy, we look at the works of Shakespeare and the Greeks; for comedy, we read Wilde and Shaw.  Fantasy readers get acquainted with Tolkein and SF fans get a background of Verne, Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke before moving on to the contemporary writers.   All of this sounds like a waste of time to the student who equates "classic" with "boring" and confuses "subversive literature" with subversive political groups.  The truth is that stories earn the "classic" distinction when they are so brilliant and memorable that they are enjoyed and understood by generations of people, and the purpose of subversive fiction is to persuade readers to rethink their assumptions.  Combine those two concepts and you'll find Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express.  No "who-dun-it" has more twists in the tale.

A bit of background for this classic "closed door" mystery, for anyone who needs it.  The brilliant Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot is traveling from Istanbul to London on the fabulous Orient Express, a luxury passenger train service.  On the morning after the train is stalled by a snow drift, the passenger berthed next door to Poirot is found stabbed to death.   Poirot is asked by the train director he's traveling with to find the murderer before the local police arrive so the innocent passengers can complete their journey without further delay.    Poirot has to remove the few  legitimate clues from a stack of red herrings left behind to determine the improbable truth behind the murder.

Because the door of of the victim's berth's was locked from the inside and the berth's window is open, it looks like the perpetrator left the train after the crime.  The undisturbed snow around the train proves the murderer is still on board.   The passengers whose berths were in the same car as the victim are from various nations and a comparison of their statements shows almost all have alibis.  These factors would have the average reader making erroneous deductions or concluding the crime is "unsolvable". That conclusion (and every expectation) is incorrect.

When most people learn someone has been killed, they automatically sympathize with the deceased.  When they hear the victim died after enduring a dozen stab wounds, the sympathy factor increases.  Poirot subverts that assumption immediately when he identifies the murdered man as a kidnapper responsible for multiple deaths and the ruin of several lives.  The kidnapper escaped justice through legal technicalities and lived under an assumed name on money he extorted from parents.  (Much of Murder on the Orient Express was influenced by the kidnapping and death of Charles Lindbergh's child, including the suicide of the baby's nurse.)  

  

An ordinary reader would look at a train car full of suspects, from different nations and backgrounds, and see a car full of strangers, some of whom should be cleared as suspects.  Poirot upends this vision by seeing the same car full of people but never assumes this diverse group are all strangers.  Instead he asks himself the question "Where else would one find such a diverse collection of people?"  The answer to that question, and the identity of the victim drive Poirot to the solution and a decision on what to tell government authorities, as this assumption is subverted as well.

1rst UK edition

More than eighty years have passed since Poirot made his first steps onto the pages of Murder on the Orient Express.  Since then, the story's been printed in at least seven editions and been through an untold number of printings.  (Amazon offers it in 180 separate formats!) The story's been adapted into a radio program, a video game,  two theatrical movies, a TV film and there's another film adaptation in the works.  It's been parodied and referred to so often that people with no interest in mysteries or Agatha Christie recognize the title and know the story packs a wallop.  Those who have read it understand the appeal: Christie's mystery undercuts every expectation we have and the solution makes us glad we were wrong.   It's a classic mystery and tale of subversion.