Death Comes as the End by Agatha Christie

A mystery book review

Published in 1944, Death Comes as the End was the only historical mystery Agatha Christie wrote and is among the first historical mystery novels ever written. Christie was the grande dame of mystery fiction during a career which stretched from the 1920s into the 1970s. Married to archaeologist Max Mallowan, she accompanied him on digs in the Middle East and once quipped, "An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her." After she wrote several contemporary mystery novels with settings featuring archaeological digs, a friend of hers, the Egyptologist S.R.K. Glanville, suggested she try her hand at a mystery set in ancient Egypt.

Death Comes as the End is quintessential Christie, with a large group of suspects each of whom had ample motive and opportunity to do away with the murder victim, an aging mortuary priest's young, stunningly beautiful new concubine whose arrogance and unfriendliness has infuriated his grown children and their spouses. The priest's widowed daughter Renisenb is our anchor and guide, a young woman who has just returned to the household and views the familiar squabbles of her brothers and their wives first with affectionate tolerance and then with increasing alarm as conflicts sharpen, fears escalate and personality flaws intensify. The customs and landscape of ancient Egypt permeate the story, but never at the expense of the mystery.

Christie's insight into human nature is, as usual, concentrated so that each character typifies certain qualities. "Had her father shrunk? Or was her own memory at fault? She had always thought of him as rather a splendid being, tyrannical, often fussy, exhorting everybody right and left, and sometimes provoking her to quiet inward laughter, but nevertheless a personage. But this small, stout, elderly man, looking so full of his own importance and yet somehow failing to impress—What was wrong with her?" (1944; 224 pages)