Review of Death on the Nile

Is this a picture of a grandmother or a woman thinking about murder?

Fans of Agatha Christie know – it’s both.

With over one billion books sold translated into over one hundred languages, I am late to the party. What a firecracker she was.

While a short story I read recently, Death on the Nile, did not have the illustrious Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, the characters this brilliant author is known for, the main lead, Parker Pynes, is a close cousin, if not a sibling to those two leads. Like anything Agatha Christie does, there is some flair. Of course, it has to be a riverboat cruise down the Nile to visit the ancient Egyptian temple of Dendara. But readers didn’t read her books for the temples; they read them for the murders. And she did not disappoint. Although this is only a short story, I imagine it is a proper appetizer to the Christie canon.

Like the grandmother she was, she wasn’t an author who killed her darlings. You know what I’m talking about. Those sentences or phrases that pop out because they sound like writing. I typically slaughter mine, editing them out and leaving the extra adjectives and adverbs for a more literary author to play with. But not Christie. For example, she wrote a line, “his face was ludicrously pathetic," and it jarred me out of the story's rhythm. But it’s freaking Agatha Christie, so, of course, it works. Victorians loved a little sugar, and she relished in it, with a sly word or sassy dialogue that might seem dated today but is still relatively timeless. I see more and more #bookstagrammers reviewing her books, and it was their insightful #bookreviews that pulled me into the Agatha Christie sphere.

But will I now dive headfirst into her world, as I did with ArthurConanDoyle in my youth? Maybe not. But I will visit a little more often, as you should when we’re talking about the great grandmother of mystery authors.

If you’re like me and are behind the times, check her out.