Mrs. Christie is known to all connoisseurs of detective stories as beyond comparison the finest practitioner of this delightful craft. She should long ago have received the Order of Merit, as having given more and richer pleasure to the English-speaking race than all other living persons, except perhaps Mr. [Charlie] Chaplin, Mr. [George Bernard] Shaw and Mr. [P. G.] Wodehouse. It is marvellous that anyone should invent a new method of putting experienced readers off the scent, but almost beyond belief that this should be done repeatedly by one writer: in The Man in the Brown Suit, Peril at End House, Lord Edgware Dies. Death on the Orient Express, as in no other stories, she has invented an entirely new device, and the new device has been different each time. The point of course is that, readers being so sophisticated and alert, it is not enough to (deceptively) clear the real criminal in their eyes: the frightfully difficult task is somehow to prevent them even from considering the real criminal at all. (p. 458)
Death on the Nile is excellent, but by no means at the level of her best. I realized who committed the murder—and even before it was committed: this I have never before achieved in a Christie book. And there are too many red herrings—exceedingly rufous and big as salmon. In a word, the story is far more mechanical than is usual. But the characterization, dialogue, the descriptions of Egyptian sights, sounds and life are all charmingly done. (pp. 458-59)
Gilbert Norwood, "Another Christie," in The Canadian Forum, April, 1938, pp. 458-59.
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