Death in the Clouds (Poirot)

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In Chapter 6, Monsieur Fournier makes reference to Monsieur Giraud, the French detective whom Poirot meets in Murder on the Links. Daniel Clancy suffers from a mental malady, in which he believe his fictional detective has a control on his life. He attends the denouement mainly to learn who the killer is, rather than witnessing a real-life detective at work. Because you are deducing from things that you have seen. Nothing can be so misleading as observation.”

Barnard, Robert (1990), A Talent to Deceive – an appreciation of Agatha Christie (reviseded.), Fontana Books, p.191, ISBN 0-00-637474-3

Police collect information about Madame Moriso. She was a true professional in her field, a scrupulously honest woman. She had a daughter, Annie, who did not live with her and had not seen her for many years. After the death of her mother, the girl receives a large amount. Maid Madame Morisot, Eliza, was instructed by her mistress to burn all her papers if something happened to her, and now all the documents have been destroyed. The Times in its main paper gave the book a second review in its issue of 2 July 1935 when they described its plot as "ingenious" and commented on the fact that Christie had evolved a method of presenting a crime in a confined space (with reference to The Mystery of the Blue Train and Murder on the Orient Express) which "however often employed, never loses its originality." [4] There are some of the usual rebrandings of characters...Jane Grey, now a stewardess, finally makes sense in the story...though has some pretty tremendous superpowers as she gets Poirot a seat (Lord Horbury's abandoned one, which is never explained) at Fred Perry's final match! Where he scrapes acquaintance with both Dr. Gale and Lady Horbury, present though previously built up to be uninterested in tennis while the snit-throwing Lord Horbury dotes on it. It's not as though any of this is new. The police together with Poirot discuss which of the passengers could kill Madame Moriso, but no one could go up to her unnoticed. Poirot notes that the pipe was placed under the seat, and not thrown away. He asked for a detailed list of belongings of passengers. Poirot pursues his enquiries in both London and Paris. On a flight to Paris, he conducts an experiment that shows that the use of the blowpipe, or anything similar, would have been noticed by the other passengers. It subsequently emerges that Giselle has an estranged daughter, Anne Morisot, who now stands to inherit her fortune. Poirot meets Anne and learns that she has an American or Canadian husband, whom she married a month earlier. Poirot afterwards comments that he feels that he has seen Anne before. When Jane makes a remark about needing to file a nail, he realises that Anne was Lady Horbury's maid Madeleine – he had seen her come into the rear compartment during the flight when Lady Horbury summoned her to fetch a dressing-case. He immediately instructs Fournier to find Anne. French police discover her body on the boat-train to Boulogne, with a bottle beside it; she appears to have poisoned herself.

A wasp appears on the Harper Collins reprint cover. So the wasp must be very important, too, right? Interestingly, Agatha Christie seems heavily critical of media intrusion in one chapter, suggesting that she herself was slightly irritated by it. Did she have a love/hate relationship with the press? Agatha Christie was already a household name in the thirties, and just a few years ago in 1926, the press reports on her eleven days’ disappearance as a “nine-days wonder”. To this very day, her whereabouts and movements at that time are shrouded in mystery. Surely she must at some stage have been offered a handsome sum of money to reveal all? Perhaps she genuinely could not remember – or perhaps this amusing episode, describing their “nosing” about a murder case with a Countess as a suspect, was a light hearted but pointed dig. A reporter in a brown suit had approached two other suspects, Jane Grey and Norman Gale and offered them a sum of money for their own opinions on the case. Maybe this mirrored an actual event in her own life. El caso de una mujer asesinada con un dardo envenenado en medio de un vuelo no me ha sorprendido nada en cuanto al autor/a del crimen pues sospechaba de esa persona y efectivamente así ha sido. Compruebo que hay ciertas cosas que ya se hacen un poco repetitivas con esta autora y por eso ya se me está haciendo fácil saber quién cometió el asesinato aunque no sepa exactamente porqué. Así que lo único que espero es que en los casos que me restan por leer haya algún giro de tuerca más sorprendente, un ambiente más diverso y menos monótono y como no puede ser de otra forma; razones diferentes. No sé, algún cambio pequeño que le de algo de diversidad y notoriedad a historias que están siendo moldeadas por el mismo patrón. But when all is said, this is a most enjoyable novel, with not only Poirot gleefully explaining how the crime was committed to a writer of the genre, but another, seemingly inexplicable secondary murder, towards the end of the book. A reviewer of the time in “The Guardian” newspaper said:The characters of Dr Bryant, James Ryder and Armand Dupont are omitted from the adaptation; Jean Dupont is the only archaeologist on the flight.