Late in the Morning

“Death on the Nile” arrived today.  Had ordered it yesterday.  I appreciate that this is all rather common, to be able to impulse-buy books off Amazon one day and enjoy them the next, assuming you don’t just download it on to your Kindle.  But it’s all rather different here in China if you’re looking for an English title.  It takes forever and there’s customs if you send it from the States and the selection of English titles on Amazon.cn is spotty at best. 

The Guinness Book of World Records suggests that Agatha Christie is the best-selling author of all time and so I had my hopes up when I went to look up her Egyptian related titles on Amazon’s Chinese site and sure enough they were in-stock and could be sent in a jiffy.  But I hadn’t thought it would arrive overnight

I unwrapped the taped-up bag it came in today and considered the balmy, period cover.  Sharing it with my wife she was repulsed immediately but the word “death” in the title.  The other one I ordered, “Death Comes in the End” won’t be any better received.  And I tried my best to explain to her who Dame Agatha was and that this was the mystery genre so death was a given.  And as one summer vacation daughter after the other made her way down the stairs late in the morning, I did my best to promote the books to them as well. 

I’m not sure if I’ve done a good enough job to make anyone do more than consider the book jacket for a moment.  There is, it seems a 1978 movie made of the book with Peter Ustinov, Betty Davis, Angela Lansbury, and David Niven.  I’ll probably get more mileage if I can find a full-length version of this flick, on line.  Quietly though, I don’t like the idea of seeing the film first.  Perhaps I’ll read it then, on the long flight to Cairo and see if other's will read while we're floating along.

Tuesday, 6/25/19