Death Comes as the End is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie, first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in October 1944 and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in March of the following year. The US Edition retailed at $2.00 and the UK edition at seven shillings and sixpence (7/6).
It is the only one of Christie's novels not to be set in the 20th century, and - unusually for her - also features no European characters. Instead, the novel is set in Thebes in 2000 BC, a setting for which Christie gained an appreciation of while working with her archaeologist husband, Sir Max Mallowan in the Middle East. The novel is notable for its very high number of deaths and is comparable to And Then There Were None from this standpoint.
The suggestion to base the story in ancient Egypt came from noted Egyptologist and family friend Stephen Glanville. He also assisted Christie with details of daily household life in Egypt 4000 years ago. In addition he made forceful suggestions to Christie to change the ending of the book. This she did but regretted the fact afterwards, feeling that her (unpublished) ending was better.
As Agatha Christie states in her Author's Note at the beginning of the novel, the characters and plot of her book are inspired by the Hekanakht papyri, a set of letters written sometime during the XI Dynasty on papyrus. These letters were discovered in a tomb near Luxor in the 1920s. They were (partly) translated by Battiscombe Gunn and published in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin in 1922. In the letters, a priest named Hekanakht writes concerning various issues relating to his family including a complaint about the way his family behaved and treated his concubine.
Christie uses a theme for her chapter titles, as she did for many of her novels, in this case the Egyptian agricultural calendar.
Synopsis[]
The quiet lives of an Egyptian family are disturbed when the father, Imhotep, returns from the North with his new concubine, Nofret, who begins to sow discontent amongst them. Once the deaths begin, fears are aroused of a curse upon the house, but is the killer closer to home?
Plot summary[]
(may contain spoilers - click on expand to read)
The novel is primarily written from the perspective of Renisenb, a young widow reacquainting herself with her family when her father, a successful, but pompous and short-sighted, mortuary priest, Imhotep, brings a new "wife", Nofret, into their lives. Nofret soon disrupts and antagonises Imhotep's sons, Yahmose, Sobek and Ipy, as well as their wives. The housekeeper Henet, under a feigned devotion, is full of hatred, as Renisenb realizes. She eventually confronts Henet, who in a fit of pique, admits she hates Renisenb and hated Renisenb's long-deceased mother.
After Imhotep is called away, Satipy and Kait, the elder sons' wives, try to bully Nofret with tricks, but the plan backfires when Nofret appeals to Imhotep and he threatens to disown his sons and their families upon his return. Suddenly everyone has a motive to kill Nofret and when she is found dead at the foot of a cliff, an accident seems unlikely, although no one will acknowledge anything else.
Next, Satipy falls to her death in terror from the same cliff while walking with Yahmose. Was it Nofret's vengeful spirit that she was looking at over Yahmose's shoulder moments before her death? The rumours only gather pace when Yahmose and Sobek drink poisoned wine. Sobek dies, but Yahmose lingers on, perhaps due to a more insidious slow-acting poison. A slave boy who says he saw Nofret's ghost poisoning the wine dies of poison shortly afterwards.
The handsome scribe Kameni has fallen in love with Renisenb, and eventually asks her to marry him. Unsure whether she loves him or Hori, whom she has known since she was a child when he mended her toys, she leaves the choice effectively in her father’s hands and becomes engaged to Kameni. She realises, however, that his relationship with Nofret was closer than she had supposed, and that jealousy may have influenced Nofret's bitter hatred towards the family. Hori and Esa, the elderly mother of Imhotep, a clever woman, who, although almost completely blind, sees things clearer than most others, especially her son, begin to investigate the possibility of a human murderer. Ipy, himself a likely suspect, starts to boast about his new, better position with his father; he plots to get rid of housekeeper Henet and tells her so. The next morning, Ipy is found dead in the lake, drowned.
The field of suspects has been further narrowed. Esa attempts to flush out the murderer by dropping a hint about the death of Satipy, but is herself murdered, although she has a food taster, by means of poisoned unguent. Henet – who knows the murderer's identity and is momentarily powerful amid the chaos – is found smothered by the linens used to wrap the ever increasing number of victims.
On the same cliff path where Nofret and Satipy died, Renisenb, apparently summoned by Hori, hears footsteps behind her and turns to see Yahmose. She then sees the look of murderous hatred in her brother's eyes that the other women saw before they were killed. On the brink of her own death, she realises that Satipy was not looking in fear at anything beyond Yahmose—she was looking straight at him. He had consumed a non-lethal dose of poison and pretended to recuperate while committing murders, both to make himself chief heir and to indulge his newfound love of violence. As Renisenb realises some of this, Hori slays Yahmose with an arrow and saves her. Hori explains all. Renisenb's final choice is which of the scribes to marry: Kameni, a lively husband not unlike her first, or Hori, an older and more enigmatic figure. She makes her choice and falls into Hori’s arms.
Characters in "Death Comes as the End"[]
See also Imhotep family tree
- Imhotep, ka-priest
- Nofret, Imhotep's concubine from the North
- Esa, Imhotep’s mother
- Yahmose, Imhotep’s eldest son
- Satipy, Yahmose’s wife
- Ipy, Imhotep’s youngest son
- Renisenb, Imhotep’s daughter
- Sobek, Imhotep’s second son
- Kait, Sobek’s wife
- Henet, a female retainer
- Hori, the family’s scribe
- Kameni, a scribe from the North
- Teti, Renisenb's daughter
- Khay, Renisenb's late husband, deceased
- Mersu
- Ankh - two characters with this name
- Ashayet
- Meriptah
- Nakht
- Yaii
- Ipi and Montu - embalmers
- King Nebhepet-Re
- Ipi, Chief Butler to the Vizier
- Unnamed herd boy
Role of Stephen Glanville in the creation of the novel[]
In her An Autobiography, Christie describes in detail the role of the eminent Egyptologist and family family friend Stephen Glanville in the creation of the novel. She records that Glanville literally thrust upon her the idea of a detective novel set in Ancient Egypt. "One day Stephen Glanville attacked me. 'I've got a project I've thought out for you'" she writes, adding later: "There is no doubt that I was bullied into it by Stephen". Glanville leant her severals books on Egypt as source material. He also answered her many and frequent questions on everyday life in Ancient Egypt, details such as what they ate, did men and women eat together, what sort of rooms they slept in. Christie thought Glanville must have been sorry he started her on the project. At one point he noted that what took Christie three minutes to ask, he would have to look through eight different books to find. Later, Glanville would influence her on the ending of the book (q.v.).[1]
Christie's alternative ending[]
In An Autobiography, Christie recounts that Glanville argued a great deal with her on one point of her denouement and that she gave in to him in the end against her better judgment, something she would later regret. "Up to then, on the whole, though I have given in to people on every subject under the sun, I have never given in to anyone over what I write. " Years later whenever she re-read the book, she still felt that she would like to rewrite the ending, "which shows that you should stick to your guns in the first place, or you will be dissatisfied with yourself."[2] This alternative ending has not been published nor is it even clear if it was ever written. John Curran is his work on the Agatha Christie notebooks speculates what the alternative ending/s might be, based on what Christie had sketched in her notes. [3] These are covered in the plot summary above.
Cultural References[]
- ka-priest
- Egyptian agricultural calendar
- Hekanakht papyri
- Various Egyptian gods and goddesses: Osiris, Herishaf, Ptah, Sobek, Neith, Ré, Hathor, Sakhmet, Meskhant, Thoth, Horus, Mereseer, Isis, Amün, Maat, Anubis, Seth
- The Maxims of Ptahotep - Esa mentions this text, saying that it warns against covetousness, which is "a bundle of every kind of evil and a bag of everything that is blameworthy".
Literary significance and reception[]
Maurice Willson Disher said in The Times Literary Supplement of 28 April 1945 that, "When a specialist acquires unerring skill there is a temptation to find tasks that are exceptionally difficult. The scenes of Death Comes as the End are laid out in Ancient Egypt. They are painted delicately. The household of the priest, who is depicted not as a sacred personage, but as a humdrum landowner, makes an instant appeal because its members are human. But while the author's skill can cause a stir over the death of an old woman some thousands of years ago, that length of time lessens curiosity concerning why or how she (and others) died."
Maurice Richardson, a self-proclaimed admirer of Christie, wrote in the 8 April 1945 issue of The Observer, "One of the best weeks of the war for crime fiction. First, of course, the new Agatha Christie; Death Comes as the End. And it really is startlingly new, with its ancient Egyptian setting in the country household of a mortuary priest who overstrains his already tense family by bringing home an ultra-tough line in concubines from Memphis. Result: a series of murders. With her special archaeological equipment, Mrs Christie makes you feel just as much at home on the Nile in 1945 B.C. as if she were bombarding you with false clues in a chintz-covered drawing room in Leamington Spa. But she has not merely changed scenes; her reconstruction is vivid and she works really hard at her characters. My already insensate admiration for her leaps even higher."
Robert Barnard: "Hercule Poirot's Christmas, transported to Egypt, ca 2000 B.C. Done with tact, yet the result is somehow skeletal – one realises how much the average Christie depends on trappings: clothes, furniture, the paraphernalia of bourgeois living. The culprit in this one is revealed less by detection than by a process of elimination."
Adaptations[]
Death Comes as the End (BBC Miniseries)[]
Screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes began adapting the book for the BBC in 2018. No transmission date has yet been confirmed.
Swiss graphic novel adaptation[]
Swiss publisher Paquet adapted the story as a graphic novel entitled La mort n'est pas une fin. The story was adapted by Įsabelle Bottier, illustrations by Emmanuel Despujol, colours by Juliette Despujol. It was published in August 2023.
Publication history[]
Dust-jacket illustration of the US (true first) edition.
- 1944: US, Dodd & Mead, October 1944, hardback (First US edition), 223 pp
- 1945: UK, The Crime Club Collins, March 1945, hardback (First UK edition), 160 pp
- 1947: Pocket Books (New York), Paperback, (Pocket number 465), 179 pp
- 1953: Penguin Books, Paperback, (Penguin number 926), 188 pp
- 1960: Fontana Books (Imprint of HarperCollins), Paperback, 191 pp
- 1957: Pan Books, Paperback, 221 pp
- 1975: Ulverscroft Large-print Edition, Hardcover, 334 pp
- 1965: Murder International (omnibus), Dodd Mead, 1965.
- 1970: Agatha Christie Crime Collection (omnibus), Paul Hamlyn, 1970.
- 1985: Five Classic Murder Mysteries (omnibus), Avenel Books, 1985.
International titles[]
- Czech: Nakonec přijde smrt (Death Comes as the End)
- French: La Mort n'est pas une fin (Death is not an End)
- German: Rächende Geister (Avenging Spirits)
- Portuguese: Morrer não é o Fim (Death Doesn't Come as the End)
- Swedish: Döden till mötes (Meeting Death/Obliging Death)
References[]
- ↑ Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (London: HarperCollins, 2010), 653-6, ebook edition.
- ↑ Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (London: HarperCollins, 2010), 657, ebook edition.
- ↑ John Curran, Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making (London: HarperCollins, 2011), 362, ebook edition.