Are this and MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (1974)...
... canon?
shareAgatha Christie published "Murder on the Orient Express" in 1934 and "Death on the Nile" in 1937 so the answer is yes, but in one the victim was dispatched with a knife and the other a 22 calibre pistol,so it appears that no cannons were used. š
shareI know that the books are canon, since they have the same character (POIROT), but that doesn't mean the movies are. I ask because POIROT is played by different actors, yet the movies were released only a few years apart.
shareBoth novels are, as you mentioned, in an Agatha Christie world where Hercule Poirot is a noted detective. As such, both are in Agatha Christie's Poirot canon, as are several other mysteries where secondary characters in Poirot mysteries take centre stage and Poirot is relegated to a secondary or tertiary character, or possibly is merely mentioned but does not appear at all.
I have never heard that a cinematic character is not considered in the canon, merely because his character is played by a different actor. As far as I have ever been aware, it is only through a change in the details of the character or his world, and also, in the case of a severe critic, in the change in the author.
For example, Sherlock Homes has been played by many actors, from William Gillette to Jeremy Brett and those were considered canon, whereas Nicol Williamson playing Sherlock Homes in the movie adaptation of Nicholas Meyer's novel āThe Seven-Per-Cent Solutionā was not.
While Williamson's character was based on Doyle's character, and Meyer's was scrupulous in fitting his story into most of the known facts of Holmes life, as recounted by Dr. Watson in Doyle's short stories and novels, Meyer's rather radically changed the facts of a few years of Homes' life so that it no longer agreed with what took place in Doyle's fiction, as set out by Dr. Watson.
This -- no mere change of actors -- is what renders a story non canonical. Also take the case of Basil Rathbone's Sherlock, who remarkably existed in the 1890s in āThe Hound of the Baskervillesā and by the end of the series, also existed in the midst of the American participation in World War Two, despite the well-know fact that Sherlock Holmes retired to become a beekeeper in the 1920s.