Word: poirot
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...victims are made--is killed in her stateroom while everyone else's attention is on the groom, who has been shot in the leg by the drunk, half-crazed woman he jilted to marry the heiress. Also on board this floating Orient Express is the legendary Belgian detective Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov), who hears all, sees all, and eats all, at least to judge by his bulk. Add one American lawyer trying to cover up the fact that he has been embezzling the heiress's money, and balance with one English lawyer keeping his eye on the American lawyer. Throw...
...Egypt to protect himself. Ridgeway's English lawyers are watching him, and they dispatch David Niven to the scene. Simultaneously, the Viennese doctor is trying to persuade Ridgeway not to go on trying to ruin his clinic, which has caused her friend to die, and the Marxist and Poirot are on the same boat. Small world...
...most significant victim is Linnet Ridgeway (Lois Chiles), an heiress taking a Nile cruise for her honeymoon. As it develops, just about everyone in first class has both motive and opportunity to do her in. Naturally, one does not imagine that Dame Agatha's immortal detective, Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov), pulled any triggers, and one can only spare the odd suspicious thought for Colonel Rice (David Niven), who assists him in his investigation. But that leaves plenty of others: Bette Davis as a dowager with a taste for pearls of the sort the late-lamented sported; Maggie Smith...
They are, manifestly, a diverse, and therefore amiable set of cruise companions, and unless one has read the book, it is impossible to break the case before Poirot does. The trouble with the thing is that though Shaffer (the author of Sleuth) can outline a highly stylized murder-mystery character, he seems to lack the energy to fill in the kind of details that can, in masterly hands, utterly charm and disarm. There are possibilities, for example, in the bickering of Davis and Smith, but they peter out. There are promising hints of giddiness in Farrow's lovelorn posturings...
...GOOD DETECTIVE STORY is the thinking man's answer to the tawdry romance. Well-written and skillfully-plotted mysteries, at their best, provide both escapism and a challenge to those little gray cells Hercule Poirot used so well. A devoted mystery reader can--and does--spend hours in an effort to beat the author at his own game--chasing subtle clues, eliminating suspects, trying to fit the events into one of the classic formulas conceived by the venerable Dame Agatha Christie...