Death on the Nile

Agatha Christie went up the Nile in 1933 with her husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, on the steamer Sudan, stopping at the Cataract Hotel at Aswan and going on to Abu Simbel. The boat in the novel is called the Karnak, and her grandson Mathew Prichard has said that its layout was observed as carefully as the railway carriage in Murder on the Orient Express. The first movement of the book, in Part One, takes place on the terrace of the Cataract Hotel.[1][2]

Her notebooks show a different book. The early notes, in what John Curran numbers Notebook 30, are little more than a cast list, and the detective in them was Jane Marple. The novelist Salome Otterbourne began life under the name Mrs Pooper. By the time Christie wrote, Poirot had the case and the cast had grown to the two dozen names the book carries.[3]

The Saturday Evening Post ran the novel in eight parts from May to July 1937. The Collins Crime Club published it in London on 1 November 1937, with a jacket by Robin Macartney showing the Karnak before the temple at Abu Simbel, and Dodd, Mead published it in New York in February 1938. Christie later turned it into a play, first called Hidden Horizon and staged in London in 1946 as Murder on the Nile, with Poirot removed.[4][5]

Part One gathers the passengers. In England Linnet Ridgeway has just come into Wode Hall and her fortune. Her friend Jacqueline de Bellefort, poor and in love, asks her to employ Simon Doyle as land agent so that they can marry. Three months later Linnet has married Simon herself. Elsewhere a mother and son called Allerton plan a trip, an American trustee called Andrew Pennington hears of the marriage and books a passage, and a romantic novelist called Salome Otterbourne drags her daughter Rosalie to Egypt.

At the Cataract Hotel in Aswan the Doyles find Jacqueline waiting on the terrace. She has followed them through Italy and Egypt, and she means to go on. Linnet asks Hercule Poirot, who is on holiday, to make her stop. Poirot speaks to Jacqueline instead. She shows him a small pistol with a pearl handle and tells him she has thought of putting it against Simon's head. He tells her to turn back before it is too late. She says it is already too late.

The Doyles change their plans secretly and board the steamer Karnak for the trip south to the Second Cataract. Jacqueline is on board. So are Poirot and Colonel Race, who is hunting a political agitator travelling under a false name. So are Pennington, the Allertons and the Otterbournes. The rich and light-fingered Miss Van Schuyler is aboard with her cousin Cornelia and her nurse Miss Bowers. So are a German doctor called Bessner, a young lawyer called Fanthorp, a loud young socialist called Ferguson, and Linnet's French maid Louise Bourget. At Abu Simbel a boulder falls from the cliff and misses Linnet by feet.

On the night after Wadi Halfa, Jacqueline drinks too much in the saloon and quarrels with Simon in front of Cornelia and Fanthorp. She draws the pistol and fires. Simon falls with blood on his trouser leg. Jacqueline collapses in hysterics. Fanthorp and Cornelia get her to her cabin, where Miss Bowers sits up with her, and fetch Dr Bessner for Simon, who has a bullet in the bone above the knee. Someone kicks the pistol under a settee. When they look for it, it is gone.

In the morning Linnet is found in her cabin shot through the head as she slept, a letter J drawn on the wall beside her in her own blood. Her pearls are missing. Jacqueline was never alone that night and Simon could not stand. Poirot and Race question the boat. Louise Bourget says that if she had gone out on deck she might have seen the murderer, and looks at someone as she says it. The pistol is dredged from the river wrapped in Miss Van Schuyler's velvet stole, with two shots fired. In Linnet's cabin is a bottle of nail polish labelled Rose that holds red ink.

Louise Bourget is found dead in her cabin, stabbed with one of Dr Bessner's scalpels, a torn corner of a thousand-franc note in her fingers. Salome Otterbourne comes to the cabin where Simon lies and announces that she saw who went into Louise's cabin. A shot from the doorway kills her before she can say the name. Pennington is found to have been stealing from Linnet's estate and trying to get her signature on papers. The pearls turn out to have been swapped for fakes by Tim Allerton, and the fakes taken by Miss Van Schuyler. Poirot says that the facts that will not fit are always the ones that matter, and asks Race to hear how it was done.