Agatha Christie - Death on the Nile
Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile is the third in her Agatha series, which concentrates on detective and murder plots set in ancient Egypt. The title character, Agatha Christie is an orphan who becomes a household maid, a pirate, an actress and a Queenmaker, all while tackling one seemingly bigger crime after another in her life. As the crime novels are generally slow paced with well developed characters, the reader will have to develop his or her own pace to be caught up in the intricate plot. Death on the Nile starts off as the story is centered on the search for the murder victim, a Chinese girl called Huangying, who goes missing while travelling in an exotic part of Egypt. While some time is taken to piece together the events that led up to the murder, what we do know is that a mysterious Chinese prince and his wife were on the verge of divorcing when the accident happened.
The novel is told from the point of view of the killer, Meryem, who suffers from amnesia after the accident. His own memories are slowly emerging, but he needs some help to piece together the events leading up to the murder. The most common method of constructing Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile was to adapt the traditional detective stories and put a modern spin on them, in order to make the story more appealing to contemporary readers. Several of the most well known characters from the Agatha Christie novels were changed to help make the novel more appealing to modern sensibilities and these changes include the main characters Meryem and Huangying.
This is where the novel takes a novel twist, when Meryem's memory becomes unreliable while Huangying has a hard time remembering any details about the murder. The two detectives soon find themselves trapped on Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile with nowhere to go. In addition to this, another interesting aspect of the novel was that it had the ability to attract several long-time lovers of Agatha Christie herself, as well as attracting some criticism from some quarters. It is said that some people considered the novel a pornography, due to Meryem killing the previous owner of the ship the Essex through his penis, an act which is approved by her grandfather. Despite this, Agatha Christie: Death on the Nile remains one of her most popular novels and is still loved by many people today.
