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Dialect
Chapter Eleven
Explanation and Analysis—Cards on the Table:
In Chapter 11, Poirot runs into his old acquaintance Colonel Race on the steamer. This chance meeting allows Christie to allude to another Poirot novel, Cards on the Table, which was published in 1936:
Hercule Poirot had come across Colonel Race a year previously in London. They had been fellow guests at a very strange dinner party—a dinner party that had ended in death for that strange man, their host.
Unlike most of the characters in Death on the Nile, who only appear in this mystery, Colonel Race features in four of Christie's books, including two Poirot novels. In Cards on the Table, an eccentric wealthy man brings together several criminology experts, including Race and Poirot, and individuals he suspects to be uncaught murderers. When their host is killed, the criminologists must discover who did it. As in Cards on the Table, Race and Poirot again work together in Death on the Nile.
Their meeting on the Karnak is accidental, but Race provides information that is crucial to Poirot untangling the interwoven motivations of the passengers. Race himself is on the steamer to catch an unrelated murderer, who turns out to be Signor Richetti. Within the narrative, Race functions as a foil for Poirot. Both men solve crimes, but Race feels Poirot uses atypical methods. He can't understand why Poirot focuses on events seemingly not connected to Linnet's murder, such as the theft of the pearls, but ultimately Poirot's methodology succeeds.
