Evil Under The Sun - References To Other Works

References To Other Works

The plot has some similarities to the Christie short story, Triangle at Rhodes, which was first published in the US in This Week magazine in February 1936 and in the UK in issue 545 of the Strand Magazine in May 1936 and included in the collection Murder in the Mews (US title: Dead Man's Mirror) one year later.

In Triangle at Rhodes, Poirot again witnesses an apparent liaison between two married people. Again everyone believes that the responsible party is the beautiful Valentine Chantry, who is the murder victim. In Triangle at Rhodes the murder is by poison and it is thought that Chantry and her lover attempted to murder her husband and that the plot went wrong. Poirot, however, reveals that the murder was committed by Chantry's husband in cahoots with her apparent lover's wife, Mrs Gold, who intended to frame the hapless Mr Gold.

In both stories, the key twist is that the appearance of the seductress's power deflects attention from the reality of the situation. In Triangle at Rhodes, Mrs Gold says of Valentine Chantry “in spite of her money and her good looks and all she’s not the sort of woman men really stick to. She’s the sort of woman, I think, that men would get tired of very easily.” In Evil under the Sun, Poirot says of Arlena Marshall “She was the type of woman whom men care for easily and of whom they easily tire.”

The character of Colonel Weston had originally appeared in Peril at End House and makes reference to that case upon his first appearance, in Chapter 5. Minor character Mrs. Gardener is herself an admirer of Poirot's exploits and refers to the case of Death on the Nile in Chapter 1 of this novel.