Murder on the Orient Express | Confllict

cover for the film version of the book

Murder on the Orient Express
Agatha Christie
322/322 pages

Hi everyone!
Today I will be writing about the conflict in the murder mystery, Murder on the Orient Express.
In the book, there are a few types of conflict. First of all there is man vs man, because there is a murder and someone must have committed it, and had their reasons. Also, when you read the book, you realize that both parties - the murderer and the murdered, also had previous conflict, before the book took place. Mr. Rachett, alias Cassetti kidnapped the child of an actress, Linda Arden, and killed her family. This turn of events leads to his own demise.
The other conflict is man vs the unknown, because the detective Poirot has to find out who committed the murder, and for almost three quarters of the book, no one really seems to have a motive or a way of possibly doing it. Also the passengers suggest seeing other people on the train, that aren't still on it. This is mysterious because these people seem to have magically disappeared because they are stuck in a snowdrift and the train hasn't moved anywhere!. Poirot has to figure out who the murderer is so he/she/it/they cannot strike again.This is quite a lot of pressure on the detective.
The conflict is that a man is murdered in his room on the Orient Express, Then it transpires that this man is a criminal, and there are any people who could have killed him with a motive. Poirot has to find out who was the murderer, and why they killed the man. In the end it turns out the the whole conflict is a big family drama, and its all a bit strange.
Well, seeing as I have already read the book, I already know who the murderer is and, I can say I totally didn't expect it. To be brutally honest, I didn't really know what had happened or who was the murderer. I would suspect different people at different times, and I was trying very hard to find a problem with the peoples stories, but there didn't seem to be any. I don't think there are many people who could have guessed who the murderer was, because it involved quite a lot of Poirots thinking skills, and seeing the evidence first hand. For example, there was a grease smudge on a passport, which turned out to be one of the key pieces of evidence. I imagined the grease spot on the edge of the page, but in reality it was over the first letter of the name, so I never would have gotten that clue.
I don't think that this is a mystery which is one where the people reading can really successfully guess what is going on, as, for example, I didn't know anything about the Cassetti/Armstrong case which was the motive for the murder.