There are a lot of clues: obvious and hidden, true and false and misleading. For my rereading, having usefully forgotten most of the details, the story was fairly fresh - but my attitude now was less that of the first reader's expectant rush to a climax that is surprisingly simple after all, but that of a relaxed, close reader who takes time to enjoy the scenery. Agatha Christie is extremely good at this. As before, I enjoyed the brief but sharp characterizations of the people in France and England and in transit. Death in the air, indeed.Īnd yet, on an idle impulse, I happened to reread Death in the Air. Poirot himself, present during the murder, appears quite suspicious to some. Poirot is flying from France to England when a woman is murdered, in a plane small enough that we are furnished a seating chart of the passengers: all interesting suspects, except for Poirot and the murdered woman, and with the addition of a couple of stewards. My favorites among the Hercule Poirot mysteries tend to be those in which her great Belgian detective is present almost from the beginning of the action and so it is in Death in the Air. The heart of this we may call a locked-airplane mystery, in which there is a murder committed aboard a cross-Channel passenger flight - in the early days of such flights in the mid-1930s, when airliners were smaller and such travel still was rather a novelty. Mystery novelists run an equivalent risk with their audience, that after almost a whole book's worth of build-up, the unraveling of the mystery may seem anti-climactic to the reader tagging along after the great detective.Īs an example, I felt somewhat let-down after reading Agatha Christie's novel Death in the Air. It is common for great detectives, as I'm sure for ingenious discoverers in all fields, to complete a complex and subtle reach of thinking with a summary clear enough that bystanders may exclaim, How simple that was after all! Certainly it is a reasonable reaction for the great detectives of fiction to feel occasionally a little under-appreciated or even miffed, when their painstaking solution to a problem insolvable by all others, is dismissed so easily by those others. Death in the Air (Death in the Clouds) - Agatha Christie