Christie, Agatha - Destination Unknown (1954)

A rather unusual Christie, difficult to pin down and say anything substantial about. On the surface, it is a rather standard thriller: Hilary Craven attempts suicide, but rediscovers life through nearly losing it in an attempt to discover the whereabouts of vanishing scientists, the answer to which problem she finds in a leper colony in Morocco. Although the reader is kept interested, he is never excited, for the menace doesn’t really exist, the setting is rather unreal and hard to visualise, and some of the plot details (notably the Betterton sub-plot) perfunctorily handled. The real interest lies in Christie’s growing concern with the dangers of idealism, a theme she developed in They Came to Baghdad, and which would colour her late works, of which this is very definitely the first.

Nick Fuller

Sale, Richard - Destination Unknown (1940) aka Death at Sea

Destination Unknown is a pleasant thriller with a shipboard and South American setting. It reminds one of the thriller portions of Sale's Caribbean novellas of the period. Like them, its hero is a technical expert, its villains are Nazi spies, and communication equipment plays a role in the tale. While there is a murder in this tale, there is no murder mystery. Also, the villains and the good guys are clear in the tale right from the start. So the book is hardly a murder mystery in any sense of the term. However, the book does have elements of mystery. For one thing, the goals of the Nazi scheme here are mysterious, and not revealed till towards the end of the story. This serves as a mystery throughout the tale, the way a murder mystery does in a conventional book, and the lead characters do some detection to try to uncover it. Also, the reader constantly wonders what the next step in the Nazis' actions will be, and the next step the good guys will take to counteract it. Both kinds of action, when they show up, tend to be surprising and fairly ingenious. This too has aspects that are mystery-like: the actions are both logical and surprising, like the solution of a mystery. And like a mystery, the story is heavily plot oriented.

Mike Grost