FACTOID # 87: 22% of American women aged 20 gave birth while in their teens. In Switzerland and Japan, only 2% did so.
 
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Encyclopedia > Destination Unknown (novel)

Destination Unknown (published in 1954), also known as So Many Steps to Death, is a spy fiction novel by Agatha Christie. Year 1954 (MCMLIV) was a common year (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... The genre of spy fiction — sometimes called political thriller or spy thriller or sometimes shortened simply to Spy-fi — arose before World War I at about the same time that the first modern intelligence agencies were formed. ... A novel (from French nouvelle Italian novella, new) is an extended, generally fictional narrative, typically in prose. ... Agatha Mary Clarissa, Lady Mallowan, DBE (15 September 1890—12 January 1976), also known as Dame Agatha Christie, was an English crime fiction writer. ...


Plot summary

Hilary Craven, a deserted wife and bereaved mother, is planning suicide in a Moroccan hotel, when she is asked to undertake a dangerous mission as an alternative to taking an overdose of sleeping pills. The task, which she accepts, is to impersonate a dead woman to help find the woman's husband: a nuclear scientist who has disappeared and may have defected to the Soviet Union. Soon she finds herself in a group of travellers being transported to the unknown destination of the title. Her will to live may have returned, but has it returned too late? Rather than surrender to US soldiers, the Mayor (Bürgermeister) of Leipzig Germany, committed suicide along with his wife and daughter on April 20, 1945. ... Nuclear engineering is the practical application of the atomic nucleus gleaned from principles of nuclear physics and the interaction and maintenance of nuclear fission systems and components, specifically, nuclear reactors, nuclear power plants and/or nuclear weapons. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ...


Background

This book explores the 1950s subject of defection to the Soviets, but demonstrates how the breakup of the author's first marriage in the 1920s remained with her. Like her 'Mary Westmacott' novel "Unfinished Portrait" it starts with a youngish woman who has married, had a daughter and whose husband has replaced her with someone else. In both books, a young man displays remarkable perceptiveness in spotting her intention to end her life and defies convention to save her, not only in tackling a stranger on intimate matters but in spending time in the woman's hotel bedroom to talk her out of suicide. In this story he talks her into espionage instead.


Trivia

The novel reflects the true-life events of a 1950s espionage case involving Bruno Pontecorvo and Klaus Emil Fuchs, two physicists who defected to the Soviet Union. This does not cite any references or sources. ... Spy and Secret agent redirect here. ... Bruno Pontecorvo Bruno Pontecorvo (Pisa, Italy 1913 - Dubna, Russia 1993) was an Italian atomic physicist, early assistant of Enrico Fermi then author of numerous studies in high energy physics, especially on neutrinos. ... Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs (b. ... A magnet levitating above a high-temperature superconductor demonstrates the Meissner effect. ...

Agatha Christie
Detectives: Hercule Poirot • Miss Marple • Tommy and Tuppence • Ariadne Oliver • Arthur Hastings • Superintendent Battle • Chief Inspector Japp • Parker Pyne
Novels: The Mysterious Affair at Styles • The Secret Adversary • Murder on the Links • The Man in the Brown Suit • The Secret of Chimneys • The Murder of Roger Ackroyd • The Big Four • The Mystery of the Blue Train • The Seven Dials Mystery • The Murder at the Vicarage • The Sittaford Mystery • Peril at End House • Lord Edgware Dies • Murder on the Orient Express • Three Act Tragedy • Why Didn't They Ask Evans? • Death in the Clouds • The A.B.C. Murders • Murder in Mesopotamia • Cards on the Table • Death on the Nile • Dumb Witness • Appointment with Death • And Then There Were None • Murder is Easy • Hercule Poirot's Christmas • Sad Cypress • Evil Under the Sun • N or M? • One, Two, Buckle My Shoe • The Body in the Library • Five Little Pigs • The Moving Finger • Towards Zero • Sparkling Cyanide • Death Comes as the End • The Hollow • Taken at the Flood • Crooked House • A Murder is Announced • They Came to Baghdad • Mrs McGinty's Dead • They Do It with Mirrors • A Pocket Full of Rye • After the Funeral • Hickory Dickory Dock • Destination Unknown • Dead Man's Folly • 4.50 From Paddington • Ordeal by Innocence • Cat Among the Pigeons • The Pale Horse • The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side • The Clocks • A Caribbean Mystery • At Bertram's Hotel • Third Girl • Endless Night • By the Pricking of My Thumbs • Hallowe'en Party • Passenger to Frankfurt • Nemesis • Elephants Can Remember • Postern of Fate • Curtain • Sleeping Murder
As Mary Westmacott: Giant's Bread • Unfinished Portrait • Absent in the Spring • The Rose and the Yew Tree • A Daughter's a Daughter • The Burden
Short story collections: Poirot Investigates • Partners in Crime • The Mysterious Mr. Quin • The Hound of Death • The Thirteen Problems • Parker Pyne Investigates • The Listerdale Mystery • Murder in the Mews • The Regatta Mystery • The Labours of Hercules • The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding • Poirot's Early Cases • The Harlequin Tea Set
Plays: Akhnaton • The Mousetrap • Witness for the Prosecution • Verdict • Rule of Three • Fiddlers Three

  Results from FactBites:
 
eastbayexpress.com | Culture | Books | Blockbusters Over There | 2002-06-26 (1290 words)
Despite her fame or perhaps because of it, Fredriksson is not immune to controversy, lambasted in the foreign press for both "overbearing feminism" and plagiarism -- in 2001, she appropriated the title of a novel by a fellow Swede.
Her debut work of fiction, Unknown Destination, was nominated last year for the Netherlands' most prestigious literary award, the Golden Owl.
She leaves behind a diary in which she has written, "If there's such a thing as a landscape of memory, is there also a landscape of hope?" Told from the point of view of Gideon, the increasingly fragile and desperate abandoned husband, the book is poetic if, at times, overwritten and overwrought.
  More results at FactBites »


 
 

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