Chicago

Chicago is the American city most closely associated with the criminal past of Samuel Edward Ratchett (alias Cassetti) and with several of the passengers on the Orient Express, serving as a key geographical link in the murder conspiracy. It is the city where the Italian Antonio Foscarelli conducted business, where the detective Cyrus Hardman operated, and where the Armstrong kidnapping case—the crime that motivated the killing—was prosecuted. The city's name recurs in the evidence as a marker of the underworld and of the justice system that failed to punish Cassetti.

Criminal and Business Connections

Antonio Foscarelli, the Italian-born naturalized American who traveled as a Ford motor car agent, told Poirot that he knew Chicago well, calling it "a fine city," though he claimed to know New York, Cleveland, and Detroit even better. His familiarity with Chicago was part of his broader American experience, which he emphasized in his voluble testimony. The city also figured in the threatening letters sent to Ratchett: the crude, printed notes—written by multiple hands, each composing one letter at a time—used the gangland idiom "We're going to take you for a ride, Ratchett," a phrase that evoked the Prohibition-era violence for which Chicago was notorious. M. Bouc, the director of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits, immediately associated the crime with Chicago when he speculated that the murderer was a "gangster" or "gunman" from that city, noting that the Italian came from Chicago and that an Italian's weapon was the knife.

The Armstrong Case and the Failure of Justice

Chicago was the city where the Armstrong kidnapping case was prosecuted. Hector MacQueen, Ratchett's secretary, revealed that his own father had been the district attorney who handled the case, and that he had seen Mrs. Armstrong—"a lovely woman. So gentle and heartbroken"—more than once in Chicago. It was in Chicago that Cassetti, despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt in the kidnapping and murder of three-year-old Daisy Armstrong, was acquitted on a technicality. The public outrage that followed was so intense that Cassetti was forced to flee the country, changing his name to Ratchett and traveling abroad. The failure of Chicago's legal system to deliver justice created the vacuum that the twelve conspirators on the Orient Express filled with their own extralegal verdict.

Hardman's Detective Work

Cyrus Hardman, the operative of the McNeil Detective Agency, had been trailing a couple of crooks across Europe before his assignment ended in Constantinople. His normal beat was New York, but his agency's work routinely involved tracking criminals who moved between cities, including Chicago. When Ratchett hired him to provide protection on the train, Hardman accepted the job and traveled under a false passport, a fact that would have made him immediately suspect to any arriving police. His presence on the train was part of the elaborate plan to ensure that suspicion would fall on an outsider rather than on any of the twelve conspirators.

Narrative Significance

Chicago functions in the novel as the geographical symbol of both organized crime and the failure of official justice. It is the city where Cassetti operated his kidnapping ring, where he escaped the death penalty, and where the Armstrong family's tragedy began. The city's name, when mentioned by Foscarelli or Bouc, immediately evokes the world of gangsters and the Mafia—a world that the novel ultimately reveals to be a deliberate misdirection. The real conspiracy was not a Chicago-style gangland execution but a carefully planned act of private vengeance carried out by twelve people connected to the Armstrong household. Chicago thus serves as the red herring that the conspirators hoped would lead investigators away from the truth.