Death on the Nile Review: Murder Without the Mystery

At least where licensing is concerned, Agatha Christie, dead for more than 45 years, has left her higher-brow contemporaries in the dust. In the past decade alone there have been at least 20 TV series and five movies based on her novels. Poor F. Scott Fitzgerald, in contrast, has notched just a single feature film, along with a few series and shorts in the same time period.

There’s no single reason for Christie’s longevity, but a decent place to start is her ability to create singular characters, specifically the sharp-eyed, perennially underestimated Miss Marple and the preening celebrity sleuth Hercule Poirot. Christie paints these heroes with a broad, nuance-free brush, but their absence of interior life has proven a narrative and cinematic strength: The reader, or viewer, is as clueless as the characters while the pieces of the mystery slowly come together.