DEATH ON THE NILE: The Best Sleuthing On The Go

                                                              

                      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.