Silence fell on the three of them. They looked down to the shining black rocks on the Nile. There was something fantastic about them in the moonlight. They were like vast prehistoric monsters lying half out of the water. A little breeze came up suddenly and as suddenly died away. There was a feeling in the air of hush — of expectancy.
I read some of my Mom’s Agatha Christie mysteries when I was a teenager — and I can’t say for sure whether or not I had read Death on the Nile before — so perhaps that’s why the solution to this whodunnit wasn’t much of a surprise to me. What was a surprise: how sentimental the great Hercule Poirot is about love, even allowing a subplot’s jewel thief to go free without incident because he had found love aboard the Nile cruise, and it seems this sentimentality is what Kenneth Branagh most wanted to play upon in his recent (awful) adaptation of the book for film (I found it interesting to read that Dame Christie removed Poirot from this storyline when she adapted Death on the Nile for the stage — not wanting the character to overwhelm the mystery — and yet Branagh made the opposite decision). So, yes, there is a closed room mystery for the little Belgian detective to solve as death visits the Nile steamship The Karnak conveying a group of the idle rich through 1930s Egypt, and while, with an oddly Shakespearean twist, several suddenly engaged couples among former strangers will disembark at the end, Poirot himself seems more concerned with the fate of a killer’s soul than the actuality of a dead body. This is a satisfying enough mystery (albeit one that I may have read before and therefore unknowingly spoiled for myself), with what I found to be odd subtext, and all I can say for sure is: read the book for some light entertainment, skip the Branagh adaptation.
“What a lot of enemies you must make, Linnet.”
“Enemies?” Linnet looked surprised.
Joanna nodded and helped herself to a cigarette.
“Enemies, my sweet. You’re so devastatingly efficient. And you’re so frightfully good at doing the right thing.”
Linnet laughed.
“Why, I haven’t got an enemy in the world!”
Linnet Ridgeway has it all — beauty, poise, an immense fortune which the twenty-year-old is currently using to renovate an English country home she recently bought from the bankrupt Sir George Wode — and although she has received an offer of marriage from the very eligible Lord Windlesham, Linnet concludes that she would rather think of herself as the queen of Wode Hall than queen consort of Windlesham’s family seat: the even more impressive Charltonbury. Linnet is used to getting everything she wants, so when she is helplessly lovestruck while being introduced to an old friend’s fiance — the “big and square and incredibly simple and boyish and utterly adorable” Simon Doyle — it is perhaps unsurprising that in the next scene, Simon and Linnet Doyle are arriving at the Cataract Hotel in Assuan for the Egyptian leg of their honeymoon. What is surprising: Simon’s former fiance Jacqueline de Bellefort also checks into the hotel and we learn that she has been hounding the couple throughout their honeymoon, showing up wherever they go, hoping to spoil their happiness by her mere presence. And although the Doyles will attempt to give Jackie the slip by surreptitiously boarding The Karnak, she will appear onboard, along with a vacationing Poirot, his colleague Colonel Race (who is investigating an unrelated case), and an assortment of fellow travellers (a romance novelist and her daughter, a sick old woman with her nurse and a poor relative companion, a rich widow and her son, a doctor, an archaeologist, a Communist agitator, Linnet’s business agents, etc.), and death and romance and investigation ensues.
Despite being set in one of the world’s most intriguing locales, Death on the Nile could have happened anywhere (the group does visit Abu Simbel and a bit of its history is shared, and there is the usual racist-ish Christie denigration of the locals [in this case, children hawking goods and asking for “backshish”] which Poirot dismisses as a “human cluster of flies”, but there’s not much singularly Egyptian about the story). Its setting in time is interesting, however: Published in 1937, the Communist agitator’s views — declaring that all rich people should be eliminated with a bullet to the brain — were considered impolite for general conversation, but they hadn’t yet been challenged by the real world application of Stalin and Mao. Poirot correctly surmises that Linnet’s trustee was worried about handing over her inheritance early (due to her surprise marriage) in light of the recent Depression. And this was maybe the last era that saw the shabby-genteel following the sun on trust fund interest. Time was better captured than place for me here.
Once I went to an archaeological expedition — and I learnt something there. In the course of an excavation, when something comes up out of the ground, everything is cleared away very carefully all around it. You take away the loose earth, and you scrape here and there with a knife until finally your object is there, all alone, ready to be drawn and photographed with no extraneous matter confusing it. That is what I have been seeking to do — clear away extraneous matter so that we can see the truth — the naked shining truth.
So, with a fairly large cast of characters — many of whom had motive for murder — and various unrelated subplots, Poirot spends more time publicly clearing away what isn’t germane to his case than discussing the proof that he says he held from the beginning. (Branagh handles this by eliminating subplots, amalgamating characters, and adding in Poirot’s backstory to stretch his pared down mystery to a two-and-a-half-hour-long film; it’s a different story altogether.) And in the end, love will be shown to be the greatest force of all; another fact that Poirot knew all along. Liked, not loved, by me; but I find myself satisfied to have read (re-read?) this.
Yeah, this is me posing with the novel while on a Nile cruise:
