Death on the Nile by: Agatha Christie

 

Death on the Nile is perhaps the most adapted Poirot novel from Agatha Christie behind Murder on the Orient Express.  Filmed as sequels to Murder on the Orient Express twice, adapted by Christie into a play, and adapted into a television drama twice; it is perhaps fascinating to see why it isn’t as iconic as the former novel.  While it does fit into the subset of Poirot stories with interesting locale against the usual British murder mystery format, it doesn’t support say a game changing twist or a particularly interesting comment on aristocracy like some of Christie’s other work.  This is a novel that has several interesting set pieces, puts the murder on a boat going down the Nile, and a red herring criminal conspiracy to bring in another of Christie’s lesser known detectives in Colonel Race who I am most familiar from Cards on the Table.  Perhaps expecting something as a spiritual follow up to Murder on the Orient Express is why this read was a bit underwhelming in places.  Now, it’s still from an Agatha Christie well in her prime so the unraveling of the mystery and her cast of characters are equally as fun as any other book.  As this is set outside of the United Kingdom this does mean that the characters are more eccentric examples of the British and of course there are secrets for every character.  There are however, too many characters with several taking a back seat and a long list of potential suspects who are disregarded once the murder actually happens putting them on the backseat.  Luckily Christie keeps things interesting by having more than one death occur on the Nile at crucial moments which helps keeps things interesting and starts weeding down the cast with one genuinely quite impactful death at around the two-thirds mark.

 

The biggest issue for Death on the Nile is actually it’s length.  Clocking in at around 330 pages in the current paperback editions, this is quite long for an Agatha Christie novel and much of the first third of the book is all setup.  While there is some genuine tension building towards the murder, especially with characters declaring other people they dislike and perhaps would kill if they had the chance.  Be it Simon and Linnet Doyle encountering Simon’s ex-fiancè Jacqueline de Bellefort, romance novelist Salome Otterbourne, her oddly protective daughter Rosalie, or the Italian archeologist Richetti, there is plenty of conflict in this first third of the book that makes it not impossible to read but feel different.  Christie clearly has personal connections to Egypt, something that does pop up as a setting in her novels, so there is time dedicated to describing the tourist sites along the Nile and many of the excursions, taking the point of view away from Poirot at points.  The leisurely pace feels odd however as the title indicates there is going to be a death and there are stretches where Christie fails to maintain tension.  Once the murder happens, the investigation is almost exclusively from the perspective of Poirot and Race which is especially fun to recapture the detectives playing off one another dynamic from Cards on the Table.  It does seem very quick to wrap up and Christie should be commended for a genuinely shocking conclusion.  Not the reveal of the murderer, this isn’t entirely a case that’s meant to surprise, but the fate of the murderer is revealed on the final page in this final moment of the book leaving the reader somehow shocked.  It’s something that may have scandalized in 1937 when the novel debuted.

 

Overall, Death on the Nile is not one of my favorite Poirot novels or my favorite Christie novels.  It’s a book that’s essentially split into two not equally weighted halves, before the death and after the death, with the first half having several weak spots.  There is still some of that Agatha Christie magic to be had and once the death happens it turns into some genuinely great investigating and a great sequence, but that first half is quite the tricky portion to get through, especially in the modern day when just setting the Egyptian scene had far more reference points.  7/10.