CY@CY Says Welcome to my dreamscape. Where a Lim is also a Ling.
About half a century has elapsed since I last read an Agatha Christie novel. I was in Form One or Form Two at Kai Chung Middle School in Binatang when I read my first Agatha Christie novel. After such a long lapse, I did not know what to expect when I first started reading Death in the Clouds.
According to Guinness World Records, Agatha Christie has the title of “world’s best-selling fiction writer,” with estimated sales of over 2 billion. UNESCO also lists Christie as the most translated author in history.
Death in the Clouds begins when twelve passengers are on board the Prometheus, an airplane traveling from Paris to Croydon in England. As the flight is about to reach its destination, one of the two stewards notices a woman slumped over at the back portion of the plane. It was discovered that she has been murdered so everyone on the plane, including the beloved Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, becomes a possible suspect.
It appears that the dead woman, a moneylender and blackmailer known as Madame Giselle, has been killed by a poison dart blown from a blowpipe. A search of the plane leads to the discovery of a small blowpipe behind the seat of Poirot, making him a prime suspect. The mystery is how a woman can be killed in this manner without anyone seeing the crime being carried out.
Poirot sets out to solve the murder, taking into consideration factors such as the seating chart, passengers’ possessions, possible motives, and gains and losses from the murder. The suspects include a crime writer, a cocaine addict, a dentist, a pretty hair assistant, a father and son archeologists.
To my absolute surprise, I find that I enjoyed this “whodunnit”. I thought I knew who the murderer was very early on, only to discover I fell hook, line, and sinker for a very deceptive red herring.