Death on the Nile: The Psychology of the Case
Note on the text: I used Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile as published by HarperCollins Publisher in 2011.
This book was my welcome to the incredible world of Hercule Poirot. As someone who was not the biggest Agatha Christie fan prior to reading this book, I was genuinely shocked by how much I loved this book. What I really enjoyed was how much the psychology of the characters played a part of the story.
Unlike Sherlock Holmes, who is all about the facts, Hercule Poirot is deeply interested in the personalities of the people who make up his case. To Hercule Poirot, the psychology of the people in question matters at least as much as the facts of the case does. In fact, Poirot says that a person’s psychology is “the most important fact of the case” (61). That is what makes Hercule Poirot so different from a lot of other characters in the mystery genre. Other detectives such as Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, or Sam Spade among others are only interested in the facts of the case, and the clues therein. Sherlock likes the intellectual stimulation that the case presents much more than he does the human element. Sam Spade is too suspicious of other people in a world gone bad to give their motivations much thought. Philip Marlowe likewise sees himself as an avenging angel meant to balance the scales of justice against a world that is hellbent on doing evil. None of these characters are really interested in the psychology of the people they are working with. Not so with Hercule Poirot.
He knows that the psychology of the person in question matters just as much as any other fact of the case. That is how he was able to determine that Andrew Pennington was not the murderer. Because, although the facts suggested he might be the killer, Hercule Poirot could see that
for this crime, something was wanted that Pennington [didn’t have]! This [was] a crime that needed audacity, swift and faultless execution, courage, indifference to danger, and a resourceful, calculating brain. Pennington hasn’t got those attributes. He couldn’t do a crime unless he knew it was safe. This crime wasn’t safe! It hung on a razor’s edge. It needed boldness. Pennington isn’t bold. He’s only astute (293).
It is, as Hercule Poirot says, the “pretty little problem of psychology” (222).
That’s what made this book so special. It wasn’t just the fact that allowed Poirot to realize who the killer was, but the facts combined with an understanding of the psychological profile of all those involved. He realized that he had been operating from wrong point of view. He thought that Simon Doyle had left Jaqueline to marry Linnet, the murder victim. Only once he was able to “look at [things] in the right way” and “realize that [Simon and Jaqueline] were still lovers” did everything make sense: “Simon does away with his rich wife, inherits her money, and in due course [marries] his old love” (318). The problem wasn’t that the various clues weren’t pointing in the right direction, it was the fact that they had made the wrong assumptions of about the mindset of the people involved.
Human beings are complicated people, who do things, including murder, for any number of reasons. Most detective good detective stories have either a wonderful set of clues that point out who the killer is, or have a brilliant psychological profile of the killer which does things reveal his or her MO and motivations. What made this book special was that it had both. What a great book indeed
