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Death Nile

Folks

• Hercule Poirot, our Belgian detective

• Linnet Ridgeway Doyle, the heiress-victim: an American brought up up England inheriting her grandfather’s dirty fortune; a poor little rich girl who’s got everything but true luv and has tons of enemies

• Jackie de Bellefort and Simon Doyle, our criminals, who have love but no money. She is the brains and he is the brawn. He’ll marry rich and kill Linnet, then marries Jackie (it’s pretty much the plot of Wings of the Dove, minus the active murder part).

• Joanna Southwood and Tim Allerton, our jewel thieves.

• Mrs. Allerton, his mother, the best character from Christie’s POV

• Old Miss Van Schuyler, Miss Bowers, and Cordelia Robson, the klepto snob, her nurse, and her niece, who is truly nice (when Poirot says to Ferguson that she’s the only original woman Ferguson’s ever met, Christie betrays a real cynicism: apparently, true kindness is novel.)

• Sir George Wode and Sir Charles Windlesham, the two nobles screwed by Linnet (one buys his house, the other rejects his hand—in both movements going against tradish nobility)

• Andrew Pennington and Jim Fanthorp, opposing sides of Linnet’s lawyers, one American (dirty) and the other English (righteous).

• Mrs. Otterbourne and Rosalie Otterbourne, the unsuccessful drunken romance novelist and the sullen but loyal daughter who cares for her. The former dies when she foolishly tries to unmask the murderer.

• Signor Richetti and Dr. Bessner, our Europeans: the Italian political agitator and the famous psychiatrist

• Lord Dawlish, who disguises himself as a commoner because he’s turned Marxist after attending Oxford

• Colonel Race, the inspector, here to scope out Richetti but who helps the investigation

• Louise Bourget, the maid who unfortunately tries to blackmail the criminals and pays the price

• Fleetwood, the engineer whose hopes at a happy marriage are foiled by Linnet being busybody

Themes

• Love
  • Danger: the moral of the story is too much love = bad.
    • Love makes you do very stupid things
    • It’s too dangerous to love too much, leads to tragedy
  • But it’s not all bad
    • Cordelia and Bessner will marry, as will Tim and Rosalie
    • It’s a regular Shx comedy at the end!
• Stuff
  • The pearls, seen as potentially “too vulgar” because they are so expensive
    • They are stolen by klepto, stolen by Tim
    • They are seen as a magnet for theft
  • Respect for expensive clothing
  • References to gaudy tourist baubles
  • When her velvet stole is used to drown out sounds of gunshots, Van Schuyler says, not how terrible, but “Impertinent!”
    • It’s that her possession has been used, not that the murder has happened
• Possession
  • Possession of Doyle by Linnet seriously gets on Doyle’s nerves
    • Her love is possession: she has to have what she can’t get (b/c Jackie’s got him)
  • The stole
• Gossip and celebrity
  • Everyone knows Poirot, Linnet, and the authoress! oh my!
  • We see a society column newspaper clipping
  • We hear about Linnet being known by all b/c of the newspapers
• Architectural change
  • Linnet renovates the old British house
• Poverty/Envy of Wealth
• Poverty can be dramatic, like Jackie’s or Cordelia’s family, or undramatic, like the Allertons’, just a fading away (158)
  • Christie implies that it’s better not to complain, for she gives the uncomplaining wealth to the “good” people, Mrs. Allerton and Cordelia, and the “bad” or caricatures to the people who do complain (Lord Dawlish, or the murderers)
    • She caricatures Marxists by showing our Marxist to be a spoiled lunatic who is hypocritical: they’re rich and pretend not to be
• Being rich makes you the subject of envy, often malicious
  • Rosalie is jealous of her having everything, not just the two townsmen at the beginning (42)
  • Wealth seems itself to cause the problems:
    • Says Poirot: “See you, 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.” (216)
• Wealth often shoves “improvements” on people without asking them: Joanna calls it “compulsory benefit” (and being a “tyrant”) 17
• Credit: you can get it if you pretend not to know anything about money and if you act extravagantly—even if you don’t plan to pay! 24
• Marxism
  • The Marxism of Lord Dawlish, who makes friends with the workers and says that it’s great that these useless women have been killed b/c they are “parasites,” even the maid
  • He’s called “our socialist friend” who “tell[s] everybody exactly what the thought of the capitalist system” (79)
  • Marxism seen as a real incentive to murder! Shows cultural anxiety about Marxism and socialism
  • He sees the great monuments in Egypt as exploitation: “useless” blocks of stone to help the “egotism of a bloated king” (78)
  • He refuses to see Poirot’s work of the mind to be work at all (97) and asks him where his body is, where violence is, in that kind of work
• Work/Leisure
• Jackie has been reduced to working, yes, despite former leisure: 11
  • It’s a murder waiting to happen, when money changes hands
• In this book, Poirot himself is on vacation but ends up working 14
  • So he can’t actually ever take a break: cf Adorno Free Time about inability to rest
  • “I am, alas, a man of leisure,” he said sadly. “I have made the economies in my time and I have now the means to enjoy a life of idleness.”
  • “I envy you.” (says the restaurant owner)
  • “No, no, it woudl be unwise to do so. I can assure you, it is not so gay as it sounds.” (14)
  • For Poirot, he doesn’t even really desire the break at all but thinks work is better because it allows you “to escape the strain of having to think.”
    • Yep, Adorno would see this as symptomatic, even though it’s consciously symptomatic: he has been trained not to enjoy his leisure. Poirot WANTS tragedy to happen.
  • Linnet says that she can buy him off vacation: “That could be arranged,” she says, when Poirot refuses to help her by working. You must always be bribeable, capital demands. (51) Though Poirot resists, he can’t for long because she does get murdered. It’s like capital is telling him not to take a break.
  • Even Fanthorpe is just pretending to be on vacation:
    • “And your reasons for visiting this country?”
    • There was a pause. For the first time the impassive Mr. Fanthorp seemed taken aback. He said at last—almsot mumbling the words, “Er, pleasure.”
    • “Aha!” said Poirot. “You take the holiday; that is it, yes?”
    • “Er—yes.” (140)
    • Hilarious!!
  • Travel solves the difficulty of leisure: what to do with it

Style

• Shakespearean bookending of the rustics’ opinion
  • Book begins and ends by seeing opinions of two “regular joes” in the village where Linnet bought the manor house
    • Lets in the readers’ perspectives because presumably they aren’t terribly rich and read the Christie novel in their spare time, and they can’t afford a cruise to Egypt
  • They say it isn’t fair that she has wealth and good lucks, setting up the theme that she should die, deserves to die
  • Along with society clipping, gives the feeling that Christie’s novel, the “guts” of it, will Take You Inside Real Society Life! So it’s a kind of tourism that the readers do when they read.

Leisure Space

• Demonstrated attitudes towards tourist spaces
  • Peace
  • Awe
  • Humility
  • Disgust (savage!)
  • Indifference
  • Curiosity
  • Fear
• What leisure spaces do:
  • They accelerate the social
    • You are never alone there (74)
    • Opportunities to witness what otherwise would be private (44)
    • People are literally closer together (171)
    • Changes of activities make you recombine into different groups constantly, even unexpected formations (103)
    • Why does it matter?
      • Each successive move to the “next” leisure space will be seen as either “getting away” from something bad (whether it’s normal life or yet another leisure space) or as “bringing to the boiling point” new or old tensions
      • Depending on context, it brings relief or takes it away: but it usually doesn’t give relief: that is the exception
      • It’s usually that they expect to be freed, but that they really just get embroiled further
    • They make you think you will get past superficial acquaintance and actually get intimate (82)
  • They discipline (as you tour in orderly fashion 101)
  • They make you display your cash
    • Pearls displayed
    • Dresses displayed
    • Travelers often bring extra moeny on reserve 208)
    • Because Egypt is expensive, it makes the $ differences quite clear 21

Theses/Comparisons

• Linnet must die because she is too rich, too beautiful, etc. Hardly anyone really mourns her, except Cordelia, who’s nice to everyone and is seen as a novelty, even by Poirot, that expert on psychology
  • Because it’s unfair, she must die
  • The book relieves the secret wish of every reader
  • Thus, the readers kill Linnet: they want her to die
    • It’s wish fulfillment, a Marxist-Freudian marriage
  • Closing scene of book is those two rustics again, saying how it wasn’t fair—instead of being surprised