A LOVE AFFAIR WITH TRAVEL AND CRIME
CHRISTIE, Agatha. Death on the Nile. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company. 1938.
8vo. Original orange cloth with illustration in black and black lettering to spine, top edge blue, others rough, with original illustrated dust jacket with advertisements in blue to rear wrapper; pp. [viii], 326, [4]; offsetting from endpapers otherwise internally minimally toned and with the occasional minor spotting (as usual); wrappers with loss to head and tail of spine as well as marginal flaws and short tears, very good.
First American edition.
“Love can be a very frightening thing…That is why most great love stories are tragedies.”
Undeniably Agatha Christie's most popular detective novels, Death on the Nile is one of literature's most famous 'travel mysteries' in which the peace of an Egyptian cruise and a honeymoon are brutally disturbed by the discovery of a young woman who has been shot in the head. Although the iconic Hercule Poirot's eavesdropping leads him to an obvious suspect, nothing is at all what it appears to be…
Agatha Christie was inspired by her own impressive expeditions for the composition of the novel. After marrying the archaeologist Max Mallowan, Christie travelled with him and was often responsible for independent contributions to the practice such as cataloguing, photographing and even partaking in the restoration of artifacts herself. It is recorded that on one occasion, Christie even came up with her own archaeological revelation: the idea of using face cream to polish ivories that were discovered in Nimrud in Iraq.
Agatha Christie wrote the classic Death on the Nile during a stay in Southern Egypt, where she reflected on the real characters she had encountered in her past in 1933 on a luxury vessel, the S.S. Sudan.
Agatha Christie and Max Mallowan's own romance would avoid criminal trajectory and last a lifetime.
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