“Murder on the Orient Express” offers catharsis through fiction for the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Crime of Agatha Christie’s Century.

A different century, a different crime: I had drafted a narrative of an airplane passenger found dead, stabbed by a boxcutter, within a cabin of suspects as diverse as America: people with nothing in common except that they lived through 9/11.

To kill Osama bin Laden in fiction is the height of presumption; the explanation, “well, Agatha Christie did it” is no better. But now I have a third reason to rewrite.