Death on the Nile (1937)

"Well, this was one of the first books of hers that I read. It’s one of the best known ones. And it has all the things I love about Agatha Christie in terms of plot, this large cast of characters, the reveal at the end. It’s quite dark for her. And I love that her travelling books have a bit of glamour. Poirot is probably my favourite detective, although I wouldn’t want to hang out with him because he’s very fussy about everything. Yes. And I watched a lot of the television show with David Suchet, to help picture the décor and fashion. It’s an escapist kind of novel. One of the things I did realise while re-reading Agatha Christie was just how much racism and anti-semitism was chucked in, often with no relevance to the plot at all. There was a man, Knox, who wrote the ‘rules’ for mystery writing at the end of the 1920s. One of them was ‘no Chinamen’—because it was a weird trope to have just a random Chinese person in there as a dodgy character. He was like, no, everyone has done that already. Not: don’t be racist. Just, it’s been done to death, nobody wants it. So, yes, what contemporary crime fiction is able to do is not only look back at the politics of the period, in terms of what was happening globally, but also include diverse characters without reverting to stereotypes, which a lot of the stuff written at the time leant quite heavily on."