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Foreshadowing
Genre
Explanation and Analysis:
Agatha Christie is known as one of the premier mystery writers of the English language, and her Hercule Poirot novels are cleverly designed detective mysteries. While the series of novels stars Hercule Poirot and occasionally features recurring characters (such as Colonel Race, who appears in both Death on the Nile and Cards on the Table), most of the characters in Death on the Nile do not reappear in other Poirot books. These detective novels are like puzzles: the reader is invited to notice clues and piece together the answer for themselves, although the mysteries are complex enough that readers generally don't deduce everything the detective does.
Like Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock books, Christie's Poirot novels are episodic. In other words, a reader does not need to read the previous Poirot books to understand and enjoy Death on the Nile, although avid fans will notice references to Poirot's other mysteries. Like other mystery novels, Christie's Death on the Nile centers around a series of crimes and circumstances that serve to obscure the perpetrators: the mystery of Linnet's death is made harder to untangle by concurrent jewelry-stealing, fraud, blackmail, and a whole host of other secrets the ensemble cast brings aboard the boat with them. To give readers a chance at guessing the resolution of the mystery, Christie's novels are full of foreshadowing—but they are also full of red herrings, or clues that seem related to the main mystery but are not.
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