Many of Christie’s most famous novels were written between the two World Wars, and in creating Hercule Poirot, Christie drew on her experience treating Belgian soldiers in World War I.

Poirot confesses that he knew about the second pistol, and wanted to give Jacqueline the chance to take a more humane way out. That's the view of Professor Vike Martina Plock, a professor of modern literature and culture at the the University of Exeter in the UK, which holds some of Agatha Christie's business correspondence in its special collections. The screenplay differs slightly from the book, deleting several characters, including Cornelia Robson, Signor Richetti, Joanna Southwood, the Allertons, and Mr. The question is therefore: how do you translate and update Agatha Christie – or not – for the modern age? Tom Bateman's Bouc, however, is carried over by Branagh from 2017's Murder on the Orient Express, with the British-born director reportedly so impressed with Bateman's performance in his first Poirot movie that he wrote a part for him in Death on the Nile.

At their shared hotel in Cairo, Poirot sees an apparent chance meeting between the Doyles and Jacqueline. Elsewhere, the secretary Hector MacQueen (played by Josh Gad) tells Poirot that he isn't racist but that he doesn't trust Cubans, and another character, Willem Dafoe's Gerhard Hardman, is seemingly a white supremacist who espouses the kind of far-right views that were common in the 1930s, when the book was written and set. In the context of the story, Bouc replaces the character of Tim Allerton, allowing Bateman to resume the sidekick role he performed so compellingly in Murder on the Orient Express.

This plot point was an amplification of the dismissive attitude expressed towards Poirot in many of the novels by other characters because of his foreignness. Poirot's little grey cells had indeed been obliged to work at full pressure to unravel a mystery which includes one of those carefully worked out alibis that seem alike to fascinate Mrs. Bessner also assures Poirot that Simon's leg wound completely incapacitated him, and so he could not have moved from his bed, even if he wanted to.Naidu thinks so: "while the effect of [these changes] may be to update or 'recuperate' Christie's original text," she says, "in the process, verisimilitude is sacrificed, and as with Poirot's aphoristic pronouncements on the nature of justice, these [characters'] comments appear too obviously stage-managed and hollow. Salome Otterbourne is now a jazz singer and no longer a drunk, while Rosalie is her niece whom she adopted. Jacqueline, meanwhile, is placed under the care of Miss Bowers (a nurse attending to Miss Van Schuyler), and she is given a sedative that knocks her out for the rest of the night.

Poirot's previous case saw him investigate when a couple's honeymoon is interrupted with murder, leading to one of his most challenging – and personally devastating – investigations yet. Christie’s own work was enormously popular, and Death on the Nile references some of it: Poirot refers to a kimono that was a key clue in Murder on the Orient Express and Colonel Race references a strange dinner party that occurred in Cards on The Table (in which Poirot and Race both previously appeared as characters). Both Marie and Euphemia insist they are innocent, and it's revealed that Euphemia is actually responsible for Poirot being on the boat to investigate Bouc's girlfriend Rosalie Otterbourne (Letitia Wright).Simon and Linnet try to secretly leave the hotel without Jacqueline noticing, but ultimately, they end up with her and all the other characters on the Karnak, a Nile steamer boat headed to the Second Cataract and back. Rosalie admits this but firmly denies seeing anyone leaving Linnet's cabin on the night of the murder. This gets to the heart of the conundrum as modern film and TV makers try to tackle an author from a different time like Agatha Christie in adaptations aimed at a popular audience. While taking a tour of some ancient ruins, a boulder falls from a cliff, narrowly missing Linnet and Simon. While Fanthorp and Cornelia were distracted by Jacqueline, Simon took the pistol, went to Linnet's cabin, and shot her.