Death Comes as the End is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie, first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in October 1944 and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in March of the following year. The US Edition retailed at $2.00 and the UK edition at seven shillings and sixpence (7/6).
It is the only one of Christie's novels not to be set in the 20th century, and - unusually for her - also features no European characters. Instead, the novel is set in Thebes in 2000 BC, a setting for which Christie gained an appreciation of while working with her archaeologist husband, Sir Max Mallowan in the Middle East. The novel is notable for its very high number of deaths and is comparable to And Then There Were None from this standpoint.
The suggestion to base the story in ancient Egypt came from noted Egyptologist and family friend Stephen Glanville. He also assisted Christie with details of daily household life in Egypt 4000 years ago. In addition he made forceful suggestions to Christie to change the ending of the book. This she did but regretted the fact afterwards, feeling that her (unpublished) ending was better.
The novel is based on some real letters, translated by egyptologist Battiscombe Gunn, from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom period from a man called Heqanakhte to his family, complaining about their behaviour and treatment of his concubine.
Christie uses a theme for her chapter titles, as she did for many of her novels, in this case the Egyptian agricultural calendar.
Read more about Death Comes As The End: Plot Introduction, Plot Summary, Characters in "Death Comes As The End", Literary Significance and Reception, Publication History, International Titles
Famous quotes containing the words the end and/or death:
“There is no calm philosophy of life here, such as you might put at the end of the Almanac, to hang over the farmer’s hearth,—how men shall live in these winter, in these summer days. No philosophy, properly speaking, of love, or friendship, or religion, or politics, or education, or nature, or spirit; perhaps a nearer approach to a philosophy of kingship, and of the place of the literary man, than of anything else.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)