Appointment with Death (1938)

"Agatha Christie has a couple of really famous overseas mysteries featuring Hercule Poirot— Death on the Nile being one, and the other being Murder on the Orient Express , which isn’t set in summer but it’s still a holiday mystery. I’ve never been able to understand why Appointment with Death isn’t up there with those two, because it also features Hercule Poirot, and he’s on holiday—this time in Petra in Jordan, where he has gone on a sightseeing tour to the famous monuments with a party of other tourists. He doesn’t know them. It’s a perfect closed circle, because the archaeological site is sort of inaccessible, unless you come with guides. Once you’re there, it’s hard to leave—I think it’s just in the desert, so you couldn’t just walk off on your own. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter A very unpleasant woman, a matriarch of a family, is there with several of her children and her spouses. They all have to kowtow to her. She’s very cantankerous. Later, she’s found dead, and there are only a handful of people in the valley who could have done it. Hercule Poirot happens to be there, he investigates, and so on. It’s a great set-up for a mystery that draws directly from Christie’s own experience of travelling in the Middle East . She was very familiar with that area, so the setting is very precise and well described, you really feel like you are there. And there’s this undercurrent of evil; she’s exploring the idea of how a disturbed and disturbing personality in a family can trickle down the generations. This woman who’s been murdered is truly horrible. She’s really done a number on her children. All together, this makes for a great mystery and it deserves to be more widely known. You do get that sometimes. I think, as the genre developed, people began experimenting and playing with it. The idea that the corpse should be discovered in the very first chapter, then the detective should enter, and the solution is delivered at the end—they started pulling that apart and playing with it. For instance, there’s a later Agatha Christie, also a Hercule Poirot novel, called Cat Among the Pigeons , in which Poirot is not even mentioned until at least three-quarters of the way through the book. It’s a novel featuring entirely original characters until that point, and again, I think that’s Christie playing with the form, having a bit of fun. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Also, later on in her career, she was a bit tired of writing Poirot novels, but the publisher still wanted and needed her to keep doing that. She started finding interesting ways to meet that requirement whilst also doing what she wanted to do. I think, in Appointment with Death , the reason the death comes later is because you need lots of chapters with the woman alive to understand the effect that she’s had on people, and to build up the possible motives. And it sets up the ethical question of the book as well, which is: is it truly a sin to have killed someone who has done so much harm?"