The “new” Death on the Nile movie…
A quick Google search told me how many have been made for the big silver screen: the ones starring Peter Ustinov (1978) and now Kenneth Branagh (2022) are the only ones. Murder on the Orient Express has fared better. Like all Hollywood remakes, one might ask: Why is another version needed?
At least one can say that Dame Agatha’s Egyptian tale has staying power. I read the original under the covers with a flashlight as a kid, my SOP for reading many books I shouldn’t have been reading at my age. I was a bit precocious, I suppose, but Christie’s novels are fairly tame in comparison to many of today’s mystery and thrillers (including my own!).
Murder on the Orient Express is like Death on the Nile in the sense that private detective Hercule Poirot is trapped, on a train in the first book and on a steamship in the second, so he’s lucky enough to have only a handful of suspects. Of course, he applies his investigative brainpower in both.
I also read many Miss Marple originals. While Christie teamed each one of her sleuths up with a few inspectors, she never made Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot into a team to solve a murder case, something I always wondered about because it was an obvious thing to do. That was one inspiration for the entire “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series; but Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express, to a lesser extent, were direct inspirations for my Death on the Danube, which unites Miss Marple (Brookstone) with Mr. Poirot (van Coevorden), the steamboat setting changed to a riverboat (which didn’t exist in Christie’s day) as the couple try to enjoy their honeymoon.
Esther Brookstone is a sprier, younger, and feistier Miss Marple; and Bastiann van Coevorden, while a brainy investigator like Poirot, only looks like David Suchet (famous for the BBC’s Poirot series). Together they make an accomplished crime-fighting duo, something I believe Christie’s Marple and Poirot would have become as well if they had ever joined forces.
The “Esther Brookstone” series, now seven novels strong, has modern themes that Christie couldn’t have ever imagined in her day. That doesn’t detract from her oeuvre, but it makes the “Esther Brookstone” series about a twenty-first century Marple-Poirot crime-fighting team an original and hopefully entertaining number of novels for my readers.
So…go ahead and see the movie, but let me just say that no movie can ever capture the subtleties in Christie’s mysteries…or mine!
***
Comments are always welcome! (Please follow the rules on the “Join the Conversation” web page.)
More than a trilogy! Someone thought the first three books in the “Esther Brookstone Art Detective” series, Rembrandt’s Angel, Son of Thunder, and Death on the Danube, should finish the series as a trilogy. Surprise! They don’t. There are seven novels in the series now, but those first three have print versions, so readers can call them Esther’s “print trilogy.” The first five are also available in ebook versions. #6 and #7 are free downloads. That particular someone might have wanted to stop at a trilogy, but he couldn’t stop a good woman like Esther from seeking justice for those whom criminals, spies, and terrorists abuse and attack!
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
