It is not often that a company gets an opportunity to acquire a piece of history. In 2005, the Tata-controlled Indian Hotels purchased Pierre, a New York hotel, built just before the Great Depression. It was inaugurated with great fanfare in the 1930s, but economic troubles quickly forced it out of business.
A painful business reorganisation followed, but with fortunes dwindling, it was left to Paul Getty with wealth from the Stanford oil business to lead a remarkable turnaround.
Orient-Express,
the international luxury hotel resort chain that is Indian Hotels' latest target, does not boast such an impressive pedigree having been established only in the 1980s, but it has something else for which the history-conscious Tata group will be ready to walk the extra mile. A name, a lasting name.
In 1934, the year when Agatha Christie's novel Murder on the Orient Express was published, the name Orient Express (also called the Venice-Simplon Orient Express) was associated with just a train. A fashionable and popular service running between Paris and Istanbul with stopovers at Venice, Belgrade, Bucharest and Vienna. The modern, post-World War II makeover that resulted in the name being transplanted to a chain of luxury hotel resorts, and had not yet happened.
Straight out of Agatha Christie: Why Tata IHC's Orient Express bid has historical and literary value
Christie's book was inspired by a real-life event, when, en route from Istanbul, the train was trapped in Turkey for six days in deep snow. On another occasion, the author herself was stuck on board for 24 hours due to floods.
Her authorised biography quotes in full a letter to her husband detailing the event. The letter includes descriptions of some passengers on the train who influenced the plot and characters of the book, in particular an American lady, Mrs Hilton, who was the inspiration for Mrs Hubbard.
The book made the train service world famous, but it had acquired a different sort of fame during World War I as trenches littered central Europe's rural landscape and the sound of artillery and the smell of gas poisoned the air and the earth and maimed an entire generation of able-bodied men.