Appointment with Death is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on 2 May 1938 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year. The UK edition retailed at seven shillings and sixpence (7/6) and the US edition at $2.00.
The book features the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and reflects Christie's experiences travelling in the Middle East with her husband, the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan. The main settings are Jerusalem and Petra.
Plot introduction
Holidaying in Jerusalem, Poirot overhears Raymond Boynton telling his sister, "You do see, don't you, that she's got to be killed?" Their stepmother, Mrs Boynton, is a sadistic tyrant who dominates her family. When she is found dead on a trip to Petra, Poirot proposes to solve the case in twenty-four hours, even though he has no way of knowing whether it was murder.
Plot summary
The novel opens as the family and the victim are introduced through the perspective of Sarah King and Dr Gerard, who discuss the behaviour of the family. Mrs Boynton is sadistic and domineering, behaviours which she may have carried over from her original profession of prison warden. Sarah is attracted to Raymond Boynton, while Jefferson Cope admits to wanting to take Nadine Boynton away from her husband, Lennox Boynton, and the influence of her mother-in-law. Having been thwarted in her desire to free the young Boyntons, Sarah confronts Mrs Boynton whose apparent reply is a strange threat: "I've never forgotten anything – not an action, not a name, not a face." When the party reaches Petra, Mrs Boynton uncharacteristically sends her family away from her for a period. Later, she is found dead with a needle puncture in her wrist.
Poirot claims that he can solve the mystery within twenty-four hours simply by interviewing the suspects. During these interviews he establishes a timeline that seems impossible: Sarah King places the time of death considerably before the times at which various of the family members claim last to have seen the victim alive. Attention is focused on a hypodermic syringe that has seemingly been stolen from Dr Gerard's tent and later replaced. The poison administered to the victim is believed to be digitoxin, something that she already took medicinally.
Poirot then calls for a meeting and explains how each member of the family has, in turn, discovered Mrs Boynton to be dead and, suspecting another family member, failed to report the fact. None of the family would have needed to murder the victim with a hypodermic, since an overdose could have been administered much more effectively in her medicine, to which they had access. This places the suspicion on one of the outsiders.
The murderer is revealed to be Lady Westholme who, prior to her marriage, had been incarcerated in the prison in which the victim was once a warden. It was not to Sarah, but to Lady Westholme standing behind her, that Mrs Boynton had addressed that peculiar threat; the temptation to acquire a new subject to torture had been too great for her to resist. Lady Westholme feared that Mrs Boynton would divulge her criminal past and disrupt her political career. Disguised as an Arab servant, she had committed the murder and then relied upon the suggestibility of Miss Pierce to lay two pieces of misdirection that had concealed her role in the murder. Lady Westholme, eavesdropping on Poirot's summation from an adjoining room, overhears that her crime is about to be revealed to the world and commits suicide with a revolver she carried when traveling. The family, free at last, take up happier lives: Sarah marries Raymond; Carol marries Jefferson; and Ginevra takes up a successful career as a stage actress and marries Dr Gerard.
Characters
Hercule Poirot, renowned Belgian detective
Colonel Carbury, senior figure in Emirate of Transjordan
Mrs Boynton, the victim
Ginevra Boynton, the victim's daughter
Raymond Boynton, the victim's stepson
Carol Boynton, the victim's stepdaughter
Lennox Boynton, the victim's stepson
Nadine Boynton, the victim's stepdaughter-in-law (Lennox's wife) Jefferson Cope, a family friend Dr Gerard, a French psychologist Sarah King, a young doctor Lady Westholme, a member of Parliament and the murderer Miss Amabel Pierce, a former nursery governess