Just like
the descriptive title I gave, ‘DEATH ON THE NILE’ by Agatha Christie is the
best travelogue-cum-detective story I had read so far in my life. In my opinion,
Sherlock Holmes is a better detective than Hercule Poirot, but Poirot novels
are a bit better than the Sherlock Holmes novels. And DEATH ON NILE is, as far
as I see, one of the top 5 Poirot novels by Agatha Christie.
I was always
surprised to see Agatha Christie ,a woman who lived in the dawn of the ultramodern
era, could write such thrillers when her Indian contemporary and my great grand
mother could visibly do nothing more than cooking, gossiping and of course, breeding.
She is better than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the fact that she could connect
elements of a novel in such a way that totally innocent seeming characters
would finally become the villains. Death On The Nile also seems to be of this
category: creating-criminals-out-of –what seems-to be an- innocent.
This is how
the book’s Harper Collins version describes it:
The tranquility of a cruise along the
Nile was shattered by the discovery that Linnet Ridgeway had been shot through
the head. She was young, stylish and beautiful. A girl who had everything ………..until
she has lost her life.
Hercule Poirot recalled an earlier
outburst by a fellow passenger “ I would like to put my dear little pistol
against her head and just press the
little trigger.” yet in this exotic setting, nothing was ever quite what it
seemed….
There is
nothing more I could say about the book otherwise it will have to be the whole
tale. The only thing: the first was followed by 4 other deaths, 3 murders and 1
suicide, all on the deck of a single steamer.
Another specialty
of the novel I had noticed is that most of the characters are all foreigners to
each other. There were Englishmen, Americans, Italian, French, German, Egyptians,
and of course, Poirot the Belgian. Most of them have a kind of mutual distrust
and suspicion hinting readers of the international relationship and mutual
hatred that prevailed in the late 1940s and 50s.
Overall this
book has a kind of a visual expertise, good enough to create an impact in you at
least for a few hours. Though not the best Poirot novel I still strongly recommend
this for all the crime-thriller lovers.
