Mrs Allerton said: ‘You’re not the only celebrity here, my dear. That funny little man is Hercule Poirot.’
(Chapter 3)

‘Pardon me if I have been impertinent, but the psychology, it is the most important fact in a case.’
(Poirot to Linnet, Chapter 5)

‘What do you do for a living? Nothing at all, I bet. Probably call yourself a middle man.’
‘I am not a middle man. I am a top man,’ declared Hercule Poirot.
(Chapter 9)

‘That old mountebank? He won’t find out anything. He’s all talk and moustaches.’
(Tim Allerton’s view, Chapter 19)

Colonel Race swore hastily. ‘This damned case gets more and more involved.’
(As they all do, following a strict formula, Chapter 22)

‘I’d like to put my dear little pistol against her head and just press the trigger.’
(Jackie de Bellefort telling Poirot what she’d like to do to Linnet Ridgeway)

Phase 1

‘Death on the Nile’ is a long book with a big cast of characters but beneath the crowd there is one key, central relationship. Incredibly rich and beautiful 20-year-old Linnet Ridgeway is ostensibly in love with the highly eligible Charles, Lord Windlesham. Her good friend, Jackie de Bellefort, posh but poor, is in love with a completely penniless but gorgeously handsome young man, Simon Doyle, of the Devonshire Doyle family: he is pukka, but poor. But when Jackie introduces Simon to Linnet, they fall head over heels in love. Linnet chucks Lord Windlesham and Simon chucks Jackie, and they are soon married, leaving both their jilted partners bitter and unhappy. That is Phase 1.

Before the chucking happened, none other than Hercule Poirot had happened to be in a fashionable London bar, the Chez Ma Tante, where he had his first sight of Jackie and Simon, when they were in the first flush of their love affair. At this sighting he formed opinions about them based on their reckless, loud frolicking.

Phase 2

Phase 2 is that Agatha introduces us to about a dozen characters, the usual assortment of posh upper-middle class types, with a predominance of one parent-one-child units, such as Mrs Allerton and her flimsy son, Tim; the florid, loud and over-dressed writer of popular fiction Mrs Salome Otterbourne and her embarrassed, sullen daughter Rosalie; and horrible Old Miss Van Schuyler who bosses around her nurse, Miss Bowers. Plus a pair of New York businessmen who seem to play a key role in managing Linnet’s fortune.

The point is that these characters with their quietly seething relationships are all shown in their homes and apartments and coincidentally all deciding to take a holiday in Egypt, out of season in winter when it should be quieter. Which is nice because this is exactly where Simon and Linnet have decided to spend their honeymoon, too.

Phase 3

And so to Phase 3, which opens with almost all the characters we’ve met scattered about England and America, finding themselves all staying at the Cataract Hotel in Aswan, in the south of Egypt. And here, by a stupendous coincidence, the very same Hercule Poirot who we saw observing Jackie and Simon in a London nightclub, has also decided to come to Egypt to get away from it all, but finds himself bumping into Simon and Linnet.

But much more than that: in this hotel section we discover a Big Fact which is that, since Simon and Linnet married they are being followed everywhere by Jackie de Bellefort. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned and Jackie de Bellefort has been very scorned indeed and is very furious. So she keeps turning up wherever Simon and Linnet go.

And Poirot finds himself being dragged into this. Quite quickly all the other guests in the hotel learn that they have the world-famous detective staying with them, and it’s not long before Linnet, fabulously rich and used to having her way in everything, approaches Poirot and asks if she can hire him to somehow get rid of Jackie. But he refuses.

Later he is approached by Simon Doyle, who explains that his former girlfriend (Jackie) is out of her mind with jealousy, and later still he has a conversation with Jackie herself, who says she is driven by homicidal rage and shows him the little gun she’s brought along on holiday. Aha.

Phase 4

Phase 4 commences when this miscellany of guests decide to take a trip along the Nile. They take a short train ride to the nearest port, where they join a few additional guests who hadn’t been staying at the hotel, and all board the steamer Karnak. This is scheduled to steam south along the Nile towards Wadi Halfa on a seven-day journey to the Second Cataract and back. Simon and Linnet try and pull off a decoy to throw Jackie off the scent, joining the steamer at its next stop, but are horrified to discover that Jackie has somehow found out, and has also boarded the ship. They just can’t get rid of her.

And so the boatful of wrangling, unhappy characters steams its way through the desert scenery southwards. Slowly all the characters on it are made to seem suspicious: Linnet’s American trustee, Pennington, gets Linnet to sign a series of papers in a highly suspicious way, as if he’s exploiting her somehow; the Italian archaeologist is furious when someone opens one of his letters by mistake; Miss Coralie reveals unsuspected depths of bitterness against the unfairness of the world; the socialist Ferguson rails against rich parasites like Linnet and says they deserve to be shot; and so on.

Enter Colonel Race

As if the pot needed any more stirring, Poirot (and the reader) is surprised by the sudden appearance on the steamer of the tall, bronzed figure of Colonel Race. We have met this solid reliable figure in one of the novels from the year before, Cards on the Table, where he observed Poirot solving the murder of Mr Shaitani. There we learned that Race works for the British Secret Service, operating in outposts of Empire wherever trouble is brewing. He candidly reveals that he is on the trail of a dangerous foreign agent, ‘one of the cleverest paid agitators that ever existed’. They’ve been tipped off that he’ll be on the steamer but not his actual identity. So there’s one more reason to be suspicious of all the young male members of the party.

(It’s notable that when they came to make the movie version of ‘Death on the Nile’ in 1978 starring Peter Ustinov, the producers dropped the entire Colonel Race and secret agitator sub-plot altogether; the film was already boiling over with sub-plots, jealousies and resentments without it.)

And then, on a stop to let passengers off to see the famous four giant statues of Rameses II at Abu Simbel, Simon and Linnet go for a walk, stop to rest under a low hill, and have a narrow escape when a huge boulder comes tumbling down the hill towards them and Simon drags Linnet out of its path at the last minute. Accident? Or attempted murder?

The murder

Finally arrives the murder which we all knew was coming. On the tragic evening in question, after most of the guests have turned in for the night, Jackie comes into the observation saloon, where Simon is having a last drink after taking part in a game of bridge. Also present are young Mr Fanthorp and Cornelia as Jackie has a series of stiff drinks, her anger breaking out into increasingly bitter comments, until she reaches into her lap and pulls out the little gun, crying ‘I told you I’d kill you and I meant it…I’ll shoot you like a dog—like the dirty dog you are…’ and as Simon springs to his feet and moves to disarm her, she shoots, hitting him in the leg. He sprawls across a chair and starts to bleed profusely while Jackie goes into hysterics.

Simon insists that Fanthorpe and Cornelia take Jackie to her cabin, and fetch Miss Robson the nurse to sedate her. Also send along Dr Bessner, a German doctor with a famous practice in central Europe who they’ve gotten to know on the trip, to treat him, Simon. Above all he insists that no-one tells or disturbs his wife.

And so dutiful young Mr Fanthorp returns with Dr Bessner who inspects the wound, agrees the bone is shattered, helps Simon to his cabin, cleans and binds it, gives him a shot of morphine to help him sleep.

So far, so melodramatic, but there’s more to come. Because the next morning Poirot’s shaving is interrupted by a knock on his cabin door and Colonel Race arrives to tell him the ‘shocking’ development (which the novel has, in fact, been heavily flagging for over a hundred pages) that Linnet Ridgeway has been murdered! Shot in the head at close range. And when Poirot goes to inspect the body, he discovers a ‘J’ written in blood on the wall nearby, as if to deliberately incriminate Jackie de Bellefort.

So who murdered Linnet Ridgeway? On the face of it Jackie de Bellefort had been going round telling everyone she was going to do it and yet she has the cast iron alibi of being involved in the shooting of her ex-boyfriend in the observation cabin, with plenty of witnesses, and the same goes for Simon Doyle, victim of her little shooting.

So is there a murderer aboard the steamship Karnak? Could it be the Linnet’s financial adviser Pennington, who obviously has something to hide? The angry socialist, Ferguson, who described Linnet as a parasite? Does blustering Dr Bessner have something to hide? Could the unknown agitator who Colonel Race is after be mixed up in it somehow? Could it be someone who has an ancient grudge against Linnet’s family and the unscrupulous way her father made his millions? Or could it be a simple case of robbery, the theft of Linnet’s fabulously valuable pearl necklace which went wrong?

‘Around a person like Linnet Doyle there is so much – so many conflicting hates and jealousies and envies and meannesses. It is like a cloud of flies, buzzing, buzzing…’ (Chapter 24)

Colonel Race

Just a note that Colonel Race quickly falls into the role of Poirot’s assistant and sidekick previously taken by Captain hastings, albeit with more authority. For the narratives to work, Poirot always needs a secondary figure to talk to, ponder and discuss things with. For example, after every interview with a suspect, the book would be dull if he kept his thoughts to himself so he needs a sidekick to ponder and analyse everything with and –thereby – share with the reader. I think Christie did well to drop Captain Hastings; their banter had gotten very samey and predictable. Colonel Race is a far more congenial companion, both for Poirot and the reader.

Interview board

And so, as in so many other novels, particularly memorably in ‘Murder on the Orient Express’, Poirot and Race set up a kind of interview board, sitting at a table in the steamship saloon and calling each of the passengers in, one by one, to verify their names and addresses and ages, and then quiz them about where they were at the estimated time of the murder, plus matters relating to all the other issues and red herrings which Christie throws into the pot…

Cast

• Linnet Ridgeway – daughter of Melhuish Ridgeway, who married Anna Hartz – she inherited from her grandfather, Leopold Hartz, an immense fortune
• Marie – Linnet’s first maid, sacked and has a grudge against her
• Louise Bourget – Linnet’s new maid of two months’ standing
• Charles, Lord Windlesham – Linnet’s fiancé, one of the most eligible bachelors in Britain
• Miss Jackie de Bellefort – Linnet’s bosom friend, engaged to…
• Simon Doyle – engaged to Jackie, taken on as Linnet’s estate agent – ‘the square shoulders, the bronzed face, the dark blue eyes, the rather childlike simplicity of the smile’
• The Honourable Joanna Southwood – another of Linnet’s posh friends
• Mrs Allerton – a good-looking, white-haired woman of fifty, amateur artist, likes drawing in her sketchbook – cousin of Joanna Southwood
• Tim Allerton – ‘a tall, thin young man, with dark hair and a rather narrow chest. His mouth had a very sweet expression: His eyes were sad and his chin was indecisive. He had long delicate hands’ – has a passion for Joanna Southwood
• Old Miss (Marie) Van Schuyler – American, ‘an elderly lady with a very wrinkled face, a stiff white stock, a good many diamonds and an expression of reptilian contempt for the majority of mankind’
• Miss Bowers – ‘a tall capable-looking woman’, her much put-upon companion
• Cornelia Ruth – ‘a big clumsy looking girl with brown doglike eyes’, taken on the trip by her rich cousin Marie i.e. Miss Van Schuyler
• Mrs Robson – her mother
• Andrew Pennington) – business partners New York – Linnet’s American trustee
• Sterndale Rockford)
• Mrs Salome Otterbourne – writer of detective stories and murder mysteries – ‘What draperies of black ninon and that ridiculous turban effect!’ – working on a new book to be titled ‘Snow on the Desert’s Face’ – she writes ‘fearlessly’ of ‘a modern woman’s love life’ – and is an alcoholic
• Rosalie Otterbourne – her daughter, ‘the sulky girl’, hates her mother’s books and affectations – mockingly says: ‘There is no God but Sex, and Salome Otterbourne is its Prophet’ – but sends her time trying to cover he mother’s alcoholism
• Signor Guido Richetti – garrulous Italian archaeologist
• Dr Carl Bessner – owner of a famous medical practice in Austria, according to Mrs Allerton ‘the fat one with the closely shaved head and the moustache’
• Mr Ferguson – virulent socialist – ‘a tall, dark-haired young man, with a thin face and a pugnacious chin. He was wearing an extremely dirty pair of grey flannel trousers and a high-necked polo jumper singularly unsuited to the climate’ – except that this all turns out to be an elaborate front
• James Fanthorp – nephew of William Carmichael the family lawyer, Old Etonian

In England

• William Carmichael – senior partner of law firm Carmichael, Grant & Carmichael, Linnet’s English solicitor
• Mr Burnaby – landlord of the Three Crowns, local pub to Linnet’s estate of Wode Hall

The Karnak

The Karnak was a smaller steamer than the Papyrus and the Lotus, the First Cataract steamers, which are too large to pass through the locks of the Aswan dam. The passengers went on board and were shown their accommodation. Since the boat was not full, most of the passengers had accommodation on the promenade deck. The entire forward part of this deck was occupied by an observation saloon, all glass-enclosed, where the passengers could sit and watch the river unfold before them. On the deck below were a smoking room and a small drawing room and on the deck below that, the dining saloon. (Chapter 7)

The layout is important because it is the setting of the murder. In fact the precise layout is vital because it all turns out to depend on people rushing from one end or one side of the boat or up and down between decks in seconds, in feats of split-second timing.

Christie’s prose

By this point Christie had written over 20 popular novels over a 17-year career, was already famous, possibly the leading writer in her genre, and it shows. Her mastery of prose rhythm and comic timing are hugely enjoyable on page after page.

The compartment in which Poirot found himself was occupied by an elderly lady with a very wrinkled face, a stiff white stock, a good many diamonds and an expression of reptilian contempt for the majority of mankind. (Chapter 7)

Poirot’s OCD

Poirot completed his packing – a very simple affair, since his possessions were always in the most meticulous order. (Chapter 7)

Poirot’s amusing egotism

Cornelia cried out: ‘But who is it? Aren’t you going to tell us?
Poirot’s eyes ranged quietly over the three of them. Race, smiling sardonically, Bessner, still looking sceptical, Cornelia, her mouth hanging a little open, gazing at him with eager eyes.
‘Mais oui,’ he said. ‘I like an audience, I must confess. I am vain, you see. I am puffed up with conceit. I like to say: “See how clever is Hercule Poirot!”‘ (Chapter 28)

Poirot as moral counsellor

At the hotel Jackie has a long scene with Poirot and tells him how her heart is overflowing with hatred and revenge, which triggers a little sermon from the Belgian.

‘And then this idea came to my mind – to follow them! Whenever they arrived at some faraway spot and were together and happy, they should see Me! And it worked. It got Linnet badly – in a way nothing else could have done! It got right under her skin…That was when I began to enjoy myself… And there’s nothing she can do about it! I’m always perfectly pleasant and polite! There’s not a word they can take hold of! It’s poisoning everything – everything – for them.’ Her laugh rang out, clear and silvery.
Poirot grasped her arm.
‘Be quiet. Quiet, I tell you.’
Jacqueline looked at him.
‘Well?’ she asked. Her smile was definitely challenging.
‘Mademoiselle, I beseech you, do not do what you are doing.’
‘Leave dear Linnet alone, you mean!’
‘It is deeper than that. Do not open your heart to evil.’
Her lips fell apart; a look of bewilderment came into her eyes. Poirot went on gravely: ‘Because – if you do – evil will come…Yes, very surely evil will come…It will enter in and make its home within you, and after a little while it will no longer be possible to drive it out.’ (Chapter 5)

This talk of evil feels newish. Was it something to do with the growing darkness of the mid-1930s and the sense of genuine evil in the world? Hitler, the Spanish War, news of Stalin’s atrocities.

In the event, at the end of the story, Jacqueline confesses that she did open her heart to evil and that it led only to more and more death and murder. In this respect, despite its jolly tone, the book is a description of one person’s descent into moral depravity.

Poirot’s suspicion of the too easy

Poirot rubbed his nose. He said with a slight grimace: ‘See you, I recognize my own weaknesses. It has been said of me that I like to make a case difficult. This solution that you put to me – it is too simple, too easy. I cannot feel that it really happened. And yet, that may be the sheer prejudice on my part.’ (Chapter 15)

All the facts

‘It often seems to me that’s all detective work is, wiping out your false starts and beginning again’
‘Yes, it is very true, that. And it is just what some people will not do. They conceive a certain theory, and everything has to fit into that theory. If one little fact will not fit it, they throw it aside. But it is always the facts that will not fit in that are significant…’ (Chapter 24)

Comparison with an archaeologist

‘Once I went professionally 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 the extraneous matter so that we can see the truth – the naked shining truth.’ (Chapter 28)

Psychoanalysis

I’ve periodically noted Christie’s interest in the theories of Freud. I don’t think she ever mentions his name but she certainly has passages describing depth psychology and such axioms of psychoanalysis as the unconscious, unconscious motivation, and ‘complexes’ such as inferiority complex and the Oedipus complex. There’s another such moment here, when Cornelia explains to Poirot that Dr Bessner (an Austrian, so a fellow countryman of Freud) has been giving a psychoanalytical explanation of Miss Van Schuyler’s kleptomania.

‘He’s been so kind, explaining it all, and how people really can’t help it. He’s had kleptomaniacs in his clinic. And he’s explained to me how it’s very often due to a deep-seated neurosis.’
Cornelia repeated the words with awe.
‘It’s planted very deeply in the subconscious; sometimes it’s just some little thing that happened when you were a child. And he’s cured people by getting them to think back and remember what that little thing was.’ (Chapter 28)

On the English

Poirot looked at him [Simon Doyle] with a slight feeling of irritation. He thought to himself: ‘The Anglo-Saxon, he takes nothing seriously but playing games! He does not grow up.’ (Chapter 6)

When her son makes a little outburst against Poirot, calling him an ‘unmitigated little bounder’, his mother reflects:

This outburst was quite unlike him. It wasn’t as though he had the ordinary Britisher’s dislike – and mistrust – of foreigners. Tim was very cosmopolitan. (Chapter 8)

Or Colonel Race’s remark:

‘You’re on the wrong tack. Old Bessner’s one of the best, even though he is a kind of Boche.’ (Chapter 23)

Hush hush

They work together very well as a team, but like Hastings, Race sometimes gets exasperated at Poirot’s refusal to spill the beans until he has the complete picture. But he amusingly falls in with Poirot’s policy that the minor misdemeanours they uncover among the steamship passengers – such as Miss Van Schuyler’s kleptomania –  should be quietly covered back up in the name of solving the bigger crime.

Race sighed.
‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘This is Hush Hush House.’
‘I beg your pardon, Colonel Race?’
‘What I was endeavouring to say was that anything short of murder is being hushed up.’
(Chapter 28)

Tourists trying to get away from other tourists

All my life I’ve read about or listened to people (‘travellers’, not holidaymakers) saying how much you need to get away from the tourists, get ‘off the beaten track’, to seek out the real and authentic experience, to experience the ‘real’ Greece, Africa, wherever.

Interesting to come across people 90 years ago expressing exactly the same sentiment of wanting to get away from the established tourist sites etc.

‘So now we journey into Nubia. You are pleased, Mademoiselle?’
The girl [Rosalie Otterbourne] drew a deep breath.
‘Yes. I feel that one’s really getting away from things at last… Away from people…’

And:

‘This is grand,’ he said as he too leaned on the rail. ‘I’m really looking forward to this trip, aren’t you, Linnet? It feels, somehow, so much less touristy – as though we were really going into the heart of Egypt.’
His wife responded quickly: ‘I know. It’s so much – wilder, somehow.’ (Chapter 7)

In fact you find the same attitude in E.M. Forster’s novel A Room With A View where all the English characters staying in Florence try to escape the name of ‘mere tourist’ by flaunting their expertise in Renaissance art etc, but nonetheless remain British tourists to a T.

Compare and contrast the characters in D.H. Lawrence’s novels set in exotic places, The Plumed Serpent (Mexico) and Kangaroo (Australia) who effortlessly escape the crowd and really do have authentic experiences, because Lawrence was a traveller of genius.

Evil Egypt

All Christie’s novels talk up the melodrama of the situation. We are frequently told that the murderer must be an inhuman fiend or a diabolical mastermind etc, while Poirot or Hastings often give us the shivers by telling us how there is something horrible, unknown and menacing lurking behind events. Same here:

‘I pray to Heaven that we may arrive at Shellal without catastrophe.’
‘Aren’t you taking rather a gloomy view?’
Poirot shook his head.
‘I am afraid,’ he said simply. ‘Yes, I, Hercule Poirot, I’m afraid…’ (Chapter 11)

Well, in this book Christie applies this cranking-up of the atmosphere to the setting i.e. exotic Egypt. Thus she has more than one character descant on the weird and ominous atmosphere of the Egyptian landscape.

Then she said: ‘There’s something about this country that makes me feel – wicked. It brings to the surface all the things that are boiling inside one. Everything’s so unfair – so unjust.’

Though this is nothing compared to the terror poor Linnet projects onto the landscape.

“Monsieur Poirot, I’m afraid – I’m afraid of everything. I’ve never felt like this before. All these wild rocks and the awful grimness and starkness. Where are we going? What’s going to happen? I’m afraid, I tell you. Everyone hates me. I’ve never felt like that before. I’ve always been nice to people – I’ve done things for them – and they hate me – lots of people hate me. Except for Simon, I’m surrounded by enemies… It’s terrible to feel – that there are people who hate you…’ (Chapter 7)

And right at the end of the novel, Poirot feels that he has seen evil, real evil at work, corrupting a young woman and he, too, projects it onto the country.

It was early dawn when they came into Shellal. The rocks came down grimly to the water’s edge. Poirot murmured: ‘Quel pays sauvage!’ (Chapter 31)

Bookish references

Here, as in absolutely all her novels, Christie has characters mock the genre of detective novel in which they themselves are appearing.

‘Just imagine, my friend, that you have been left trustee to the daughter of an intensely wealthy man. You use, perhaps, that money to speculate with. I know it is so in all detective novels – but you read of it too in the newspapers. It happens, my friend, it happens.’ (Chapter

His mother laughed. ‘Darling, you sound quite excited. Why do men enjoy crime so much? I hate detective stories and never read them.’

‘A man – certainly a man who had had much handling of firearms – would know that. But a woman – a woman would not know.’
Race looked at him curiously. ‘Probably not.’
‘No. She would have read the detective stories where they are not always very exact as to details.’ (Chapter 18)

‘I suppose the stewardess is in attendance to see I don’t hang myself or swallow a miraculous capsule of prussic acid as people always do in books.’ (Jacqueline, Chapter 30)

Or romantic melodramas:

‘Who is A, by the way? A particularly disagreeable person?’
‘On the contrary. A is a charming, rich, and beautiful young lady.’
Race grinned.
‘Sounds quite like a novelette.’ (Chapter 12)

‘Yes, yes. It is, as I say, of an astonishing simplicity! It is so familiar, is it not? It has been done so often, in the pages of the romance of crime! It is now, indeed, a little vieux jeu!’ (Chapter 13)

But the self-consciousness about the book’s artificiality is shown in other ways. There’s a nice scene where Poirot encounters Mrs Allerton on a rock by the river sketching, they get into conversation and she tells him she amuses herself by imagining what kind of murders all her fellow guests would commit, in what kind of style, while Poirot indulges her and elaborates the options.

In other words, Christie continually reminds the reader that they are reading a detective novel and that the story isn’t real. On the face of it this ought to distance us from the story and yet, paradoxically, it has the opposite effect: the more artificial we’re told it is, the more outrageous coincidences, florid characters and silly sub-plots it contains, the more powerfully it grips us.

The writer

There’s a steady trickle of writers among Christie’s characters, from Miss Marple’s nephew Raymond West to the boomingly feminist Ariadne Oliver in ‘Cards on the Table’ (1936). This latter, with her endless fussing about her hair and her insatiable appetite for apples, is a larger-than-life figure of fun – and so is the lady author in’ Death on the Nile’, Mrs Salome Otterbourne.

Her over-florid dresses, her insistence on talking about Sex as being at the root of all human behaviour (‘The deep, primeval, primordial urges’), her wild speculations about the murder to anyone who will listen – her daughter finds her unbearable and even Colonel Race at one point comments, after having to listen to her insufferable chatter:

‘What a poisonous woman! Whew! Why didn’t somebody murder her!’
‘It may yet happen,” Poirot consoled him. (Chapter 17)

It would be tempting to single out these (women) writers as the central figures of fun and mount a pseudo-feminist critique, except for the obvious fact that so are numerous other comic characters, starting with the wonderfully superior and arrogant Miss Van Schuyler.

Modern life

Standard tropes about the whirligig of modern life, here expressed by Simon Doyle:

‘Nobody minds what happened to their fathers nowadays. Life goes too fast for that.’ (Chapter 14)

Poirotisms

‘The hotel’s half empty, and everyone’s about a hundred – ‘
She stopped – biting her lip. Hercule Poirot’s eyes twinkled.
‘It is true, yes, I have one leg in the grave.’ (Chapter 2)

Simon said boyishly: ‘You must tell us something about your cases on board the Karnak.’
‘No, no; that would be to talk – what do you call it? – the shop.’ (Chapter 4)

‘Up to a point it is all the clear sailing.’ (Chapter 16)

Poirot nodded. ‘But for the moment,’ he said, and smiled, ‘we handle him with the gloves of kid, is it not so?’ (Chapter 18)

‘I am talking about facts, Mademoiselle – plain ugly facts. Let us call the spade the spade.’ (Chapter 19)

Credit

‘Death on the Nile’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in 1937.

Related links

• Death on the Nile online (PDF)
• Agatha Christie website

Related reviews

• Agatha Christie reviews
• 1930s reviews