Can you believe I had never read an Agatha Christie novel before? As the reigning queen of the detective novel scene for much of the twentieth century, Christie’s contributions to the genre are immeasurable. She gave us two of the best-known detective characters after Sherlock—Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple—and some of her major works such as Murder on the Orient Express have been adapted so many times over that they’ve become cultural touchstones. Despite all this, and my love of mystery novels dating back to my earliest reading years, I just had never gotten around to picking up one of Christie’s classics. Thankfully, the Romancing the Gothic book club has been working hard to improve my literary education. Last month we read Christie’s 1937 novel Death on the Nile. And I have to say, I’ll definitely be coming back for some more Poirot!
The opening pages of Death on the Nile center on Linnet Ridgeway, the girl who has everything. She always gets what she wants—including the beau of her close friend Jacqueline de Bellefort. But when Linnet and her new husband Simon Doyle go on their honeymoon, they are disturbed to find the spurned Jacqueline dogging their every step. When Jacqueline catches up to the happy couple in Egypt, Linnet tries to enlist the help of the vacationing detective Hercule Poirot. Though reluctant to get involved in this sort of interpersonal drama, Poirot has a bad feeling about the situation—especially when they all end up in the confined spaces of a cruise ship together, along with a motley cast of other questionable characters. Despite Poirot’s best efforts to ease the tensions, Linnet is shot dead in her cabin one night and Jacqueline is the obvious suspect. …A little too obvious, plus she has an air-tight alibi. But then who else could it be: the engineer with a grudge? Linnet’s scheming trustee? the angry communist? the international criminal hidden in their midst? Or is someone onboard just a common thief willing to kill for a string of pearls? Everyone on the ship is a suspect, and anyone who gets too close to the truth is in danger of becoming the killer’s next victim.
I’ve talked before on this blog about how the detective novel grew out of Gothic literature. Indeed, many early Gothic novels feature mysteries and/or murders. But what sets the detective novel apart is the central figure of the detective character. Edgar Allan Poe is largely regarded as having initiated this role with his French detective C. Auguste Dupin. And Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes is, of course, the most recognizable example of this character trope. Christie’s Hercule Poirot shares much in common with his predecessors. Like Dupin and Holmes, Poirot has gained a reputation for solving crimes that baffle the police through sheer logical deduction. He’s got something of an ego, and loves to take his moment in the spotlight toward the end of the novel to lay out the brilliant reasoning that has led him to the mystery’s solution. But rather than being portrayed as solely interested in cold, hard logic, Poirot is also a man of great compassion and empathy. In Death on the Nile, he becomes quite emotionally invested in the lives of his fellow travelers, including some who are among the top suspects for murder. Poirot is also fairly social. Rather than arriving on the scene after the fact to examine the evidence and solve the mystery in isolation, Poirot collects many of his clues in this book before the murder even occurs by simply engaging in conversation and forming relationships with his companions. Due to his approachable nature, many of the other characters feel comfortable baring their souls to him and confessing things about themselves and others that no one else knows.
What makes Death on the Nile, in particular, so fun is its setting. A cruise ship is the perfect place for a murder. It’s isolated and confined—the murder, witnesses, and potential victims are all trapped together onboard the ship, with no way to escape until it docks again. This also means we’re stuck with a limited number of characters within a closed system. They’ve spent an extended period of time getting to know each other in close quarters—and now one among them is a murderer! Shortly after Linnet’s death, two witnesses are then killed off in quick succession, which shrinks the cast of characters even further and adds a sense of immediate danger to everyone onboard. There’s just something particularly terrifying about seeing your fellow passengers get picked off one by one—a plot device that has worked well in everything from Mira Grant’s mermaid horror Into the Drowning Deep to the Demeter voyage episode of Netflix’s Dracula miniseries. Aside from its sense of isolation and imprisonment, the ship makes an excellent setting for a crime story because of the way it seems to exist out of place and time. The passengers onboard are all from Europe or America and have traveled to experience the unfamiliar and exotic land of Egypt, bringing colonial mindsets with them that already associate the East with both danger and adventure. But the ship is even more strange: it exists neither in one location nor another, but moves between spaces. Time, too, seems to work differently on the ship, as the characters onboard form their own bubble and move at a different pace than the outside world.
Have you read Death on the Nile? If you’d like a copy, you can buy one online and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. Let me know what you think of it in the comments—though please refrain from spoiling the identity of the murderer for those who haven’t finished! Please leave your suggestions, as well. What Agatha Christie Book should I pick up next?