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EuSei
Nov 11, 2014EuSei rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
This is a very clever plot, well thought out and—if you never watched the movie—with a startling end. I never thought I’d catch a mistake in a book written by Agatha Christie! Yet, I did catch two… The first one was in a dialogue between Hercule Poirot, Dr. Constantine, and Monsieur Bouc (which, by the way, means “goat” in French). Poirot was describing three possibilities that explained the crime. The last and third possibility was that evidence had been faked “for the same reason as above”… Obviously the word should have been “already mentioned” or something like that, never “above,” which does not accord with a dialogue. The second was the American characters using the word “frontier” instead of border. It was surprising that her editors never caught these two simple mistakes. (About the criticism on the snow stopping a train: the story was written in 1934, when there were no advanced machinery for snow removal as we now have and people didn’t have cell phones, so communication was not instantaneous. As Christie refers more than once throughout the book, there was heavy snowfall. It was not a snowbank, but snow that had heavily accumulated on the tracks, which in 1934 would have taken time to remove.)