Special attention is given to Mr Clancy, a detective novelist who enables Christie to include the same sort of parodies of her craft achieved in other novels through the character of Ariadne Oliver. Equally, Madame Giselle had an estranged daughter who will inherit her considerable estate: could one of the female passengers be this heiress? Much of the novel focuses on the pursuit of this line of enquiry, with the passengers coming under suspicion in turn. Madame Giselle is suspected of using blackmail to ensure that her clients paid up, so any of the passengers could either have owed her money or feared exposure. He appears to be the killer, but how can he have committed the murder, when he was apparently in conversation with Jane Grey (the novel's effective heroine) throughout the flight? And why would he have committed the crime? And why were there two coffee spoons in the victim's saucer? Without explaining himself, he asks or a detailed list of the items in the possession of the passengers, and finds an incriminating clue: Norman Gale, a dentist who has seemingly never been in the area of the plane where the victim was killed, and has no apparent motive for committing the murder, had an empty matchbox and a lighter. Poirot's focus is upon a wasp that has been seen in the compartment and which provided evidence for the original theory of the cause of death. Is it the flute of one passenger, or perhaps one of the ancient tubes carried by one of the two French archaeologists (father and son) on board? Or maybe Lady Horbury's long cigarette holder?
It becomes apparent that the victim has been murdered.įrustrated with the evident artificiality of the blowpipe, an item that could hardly have been used without being seen by another passenger, Poirot suggests that the means of delivering the dart may have been something else. Initially, a reaction to a wasp sting is postulated, but Poirot spies the true cause of death: a poison-tipped dart, apparently fired from a blowgun. Some time before landing, one of the passengers, Madame Giselle - a wealthy French moneylender - is found dead. In the book, Poirot is a passenger on board a flight from Paris to Croydon Airport.
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