Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie - Review by Terry Heiser
I have my favourites: spy novels by le Carre; detective novels by Raymond Chandler; police novels by Mankell and Donna Leon; old-fashioned murder mysteries by P. D. James; the novels of gentleman detectives like Sherlock Holmes or Fandurin (Botris Akunin).
But on the whole, the great majority are not literary classics that will stand the test of time. “Crime and Punishment" is a great novel about crime. “Bleak House“ is full of criminality. They are still being read 100 years or more after they are written. Most of the novels by Agatha Christie and the hundreds of other popular writers on crime will not survive that long. But some will make a case for a few. Such as Raymond Chandler.
What made me choose “Death on the Nile" for us to read was that it is a typical Christie novel. and wanted to look at two things. Why has the English "country house" novel endured; and how did a second rate writer like Chrtistie create characters which rise far above the level of the novels in which they live and populate the public imagination?
First-the endurance of the country house novel. Christie wrote 38 novels and 65 short stories. “Death on the Nile” was written at the height of her popularity in 1939. She published many under the imprint of “The Crime Club” (pub.Collins). In “Death”, Christie introduces us in the first 30 pages to all the dozen or so characters - Poirot. himself, and Colonel Race, who serves as an assistant in solving the mystery, but in such a way as to flatter Poirot’s “little grey cells";
The main murder victim is Linett Ridgeway, “the richest girl in England” and her friend Jacqueline de Bellefort; the man she steals from Jacqueline and marries Simon Doyle.
It is usually said that Christie can only create cardboard characters. This it broadly true, since they all serve to form part of the puzzle that has to be solved. But she is skilful at giving them each enough life to make them potential suspects with a motive for murder. And she can do more than that. e.g. Cordelia, the plain Jane who is brighter and more sensible than others think, comes alive on the page.
Once on the boat, she moves the story on rapidly with an absorbing series of murders - that of Linnet herself, and two others who we find have to be eliminated as otherwise they would give the game away -Mrs. Otterburn and Louise Bourget.
On the night of the murder, Jacqueline argues with Simon and supposedly shoots him in the leg. The gun disappears. Jacqueline, in a state of shock, is sedated. Linnett is found by Poirot murdered with a J scrawled in blood beside her and her necklace is missing. There are clues aplenty - rosary, nail polish and a velvet shawl. But halfway through, in case you are not keeping up, we are given a memorandum by Colonel Race summing up the key facts so far.
Then comes the classic Christie denouement, with the gathering of the survivors together to reveal the arch-criminal as Jacqueline, who has conspired with Linnett’s husband to murder Linnett. The story is now well known to all whom like this sort of thing because of frequent TV reshowing of the film vesions. But the denouement probably comes as a surprise to most readers who pick up the novel for the first time.
One middle-aged lad, a snob from the English Home Counties, says Poirot is “an old mountebank! He’s all talk and moustaches.” Far from it!
“Death” is the kind of novel of the golden age of English crime fiction, presided over by Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Ngaio Marsh. Some critics dismissed this particular genre with contempt. Edmond Wilson once wrote an essay in 1943 entitled “Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd”?
Raymond Chandler wrote another famous essay in 1944 - only a year previously - 'The Simple Art of Murder'. He concludes that the English genre is too out of touch with the modern world to succeed. He favours the hard-boiled world of his own hero, Philip Marlow, who goes down the mean streets of Los Angeles to rescue the weak and oppressed. His model is Dashiell Hammett who created the detective Sam Spade and wrote the” The Maltese Falcon”.
Subsequently, in 1946, George Orwell published 'The Decline of the English Murder', an essay which both charts and laments the demise of a specific kind of criminal: the English gentleman-murderer, who commits his crimes in a domestic, often suburban setting.
But the truth is that classic “country house" novel continues to be read and thrive in the hands of authors like P. D. James. These novels all present an enclosed and hierarchically ordered society, in which everyone knows their place and role. This order is shattered by a murder. The detective-professional or amateur – arrives on the scene and solves the puzzle. And the reader follows the detective and attempts to solve the puzzle under his or her detection. The murderer is unmasked and order is restored.
There is another kind of mystery here - how secondary writers like Christie can create a character who enters into and remains into the public imagination. It is one thing for a major author to do this -unforgettable characters like Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist and Beccy Sharp,
But what about immortal characters by lesser writers, who produced at best what Orwell called “good bad books”.
-Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and his monster. -Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, who was so popular that the public would not let him die. Conan Doyle had to bring him back to life after he had left him for dead at the foot of the Reichenbach falls after a struggle with the “Napoleon of Crime”, Dr. Moriarty ;
-Dracula, created by Bram Stoker, Henry Irving’s stage manager; -Svengali, created by the artist and actor du Maurier;
-Buchan’s Richard Hannay; - Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond; -Fleming’s Bond; and characters from children’s fiction like Biggles and Bunter. Christie of course has left us with two
- Miss Marple and Poirot. How did she do it? After all Poirot seems like a character created from mother’s dressing up box as a stage foreigner. At one level, he is a collection of clichés:
-dapper, fastidious
- “I like an audience. I am vain. I am puffed up with conceit. I like to say “See how clever Poirot is”…..
-“I am constantly in the habit of being bright”
-a lover of symmetry, order, cleanliness, good food and fine wine;
-courteous but impatient when in pursuit;
-a stock foreigner who eloquently mangles stock English phrases, hates the outdoors and adores central heating;
-above all a thinker who solves problems by using “his little grey cells”
Of course, it is true that film and TV have extended the life of these larger than life characters. It would be difficult for the middle-aged to see Poirot as anyone but David Suchet; a good actor can give a depth to this type of literary creation that the authors could not.
Readers of Carl Jung - if there are any left, will explain Poirot’s impact by reference to a Jungian archetype.