In Fact, One of the Things He Loves About Christie Is That She Doesn’t Waste Time on Long Descriptions of Place

Falling in love with a novel motivated these five travel writers to immerse themselves in locations from the Yukon and Kyrgyzstan to the Côte d’Azur. Inspired by Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, Marcel Theroux visited Istanbul, even though the city only makes a fleeting appearance in the novel. In fact, one of the things he loves about Christie is that she doesn’t waste time on long descriptions of place.

Part of the charm of her detective novels is that they are welterweights, all knotty muscle and six-packs, feinting one way then smacking you in the chops with an unexpected revelation. An extra stone of description would kill that energy. And it’s possible to read Murder on the Orient Express and miss how important the city is, both to the novel and its author.

Christie is a master of misdirection and buried clues. Even her autobiography is notably guarded about her personal life. She doesn’t hide the fact, however, that her first trip to Istanbul was a landmark.

She went as a solo traveller after her first marriage broke down and the city became the starting point for her life’s second chapter. She often stayed at the Pera Palace Hotel and allegedly wrote a draft of Murder on the Orient Express in one of its rooms. Pera Palace is still going; its suite 411 is named in Christie’s honour and kitted out with an antique typewriter and copies of her novels.

From Istanbul, Christie undertook intrepid overland adventures to the Middle East. Amazingly, in those days you could travel from Haydarpaşa station on the city’s Anatolian side all the way to Baghdad, Mosul and Tehran. One Easter egg buried in the pages of Murder on the Orient Express is the name of the hotel that Poirot visits in its second chapter: the Tokatlian.

Christie is so sparing with details that this really stands out. The handsome facade of the Tokatlian is still intact. You can read the name carved on the masonry of its upper storeys, but today it houses shops and offices.

It couldn’t be more central: it stands on a corner of İstiklal Avenue, the long, pedestrianised thoroughfare that runs through the heart of the Beyoğlu district. At one end is Taksim Square; at the other, the Tünel, the amazing Victorian funicular that is the second-oldest underground railway in the world, after the London Underground. Theroux sneaked into the Tokatlian and had an underwhelming wander: the hotel shut down many years ago.

But once upon a time, this was the place to stay in Istanbul. It’s where Christie herself spent her first nights in the city. In her autobiography, she describes going to a restaurant on a nearby backstreet run by White Russians.

That is almost certainly Rejans, renamed Istanbul 1924, and still doing good business serving Russian-inspired food and flavoured vodka. Poirot doesn’t stay the night in Istanbul. He barely has time for a bath and a bowl of soup before he has to get across the Golden Horn to Sirkeci station and catch the 9pm train to Paris, which he finds mysteriously crowded.

That train doesn’t run any longer, sadly, but the echoing interior of Sirkeci and its fetching pink facade give you a tantalising flavour of what it must have been like to travel by train in that era. One thing that’s clear is that Christie knows far more about Istanbul than she makes explicit in Murder on the Orient Express. She doesn’t show off any local knowledge; there’s not a glimpse of a hammam or a mosque, no one smoking a shisha, no sense of Turkish food – or any food for that matter.

But the book is still rooted in Istanbul and an intriguingly understated introduction to it. Istanbul’s unique geography and blended cultures shape the opening chapters. Christie perfectly understands the logistics involved in moving Poirot around the city.

And just as she leaves clues that enable an alert reader to solve the mysteries in her novels, she drops hints at what it is that makes Istanbul special. This is a gift: her reticence leaves anyone travelling in her footsteps free to make their own discoveries. Theroux also came to Jack London through Mr Hill, the best English teacher he ever had, and so from early on a love of the North – breathlessly capitalised – and a love of words went hand in hand.

It’s the story of Buck, a Californian house dog, abducted to work pulling sledges in the Yukon gold rush who, chapter by chapter, frees himself from the shackles of civilisation. He liked Buck but it was the Yukon that held him. “The stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow.

Here was the midnight sun and endless spruce forest, the noble wolf and 50 degrees below, and solitary men grinding a living from the land. It was a place that seemed impossibly distant, not only in space but in time. He made it there two decades later.

He spent five months paddling the length of the Yukon River, from its source in the Pelly Mountains. It was a place of superlatives. The river is 2,000 miles long and, where it meets the Bering Sea, some of its channels can be seven miles from bank to bank.

Rereading the book this past week, placenames that once sounded like invocations have become familiar to him: Five Fingers, Little Salmon, Sixtymile. Outside Circle City, where Buck attacked the troublemaker Black Burton in a bar, he saw his first grizzly. In Dawson, where in a wager Buck pulled a sled that weighed 1,000lbs, he visited London’s cabin, or the half that remained (the other is on display in California).

London spent fewer than nine months in Dawson, and most of those in bed with scurvy. His experience of this “Northland”, as he calls it, is not the one of the characters he beatifies.”