Book review: “So Many Steps to Death” by Agatha Christie

The Deputy Director of the Unit, a secret laboratory/factory for geniuses, opens the door to Tom Betterton’s quarters and says, “Ah, Betterton — here we are at last! Your wife!”

With four quick steps, the famous discoverer of ZE Fission crosses to the red-haired woman and takes her into his arms, saying, “Olive, darling.”

It’s hours later, up on the roof garden where he’s less afraid of eavesdropping, that Betterton finally gets the chance to say in a nervous voice:

“Now: Who the hell are you?”

 

“Nothing to live for”

A great many people in Agatha Christie’s 1954 spy novel So Many Steps to Death, published as Destination Unknown in the UK, aren’t who they seem to be.

Betterton, in fact, doesn’t even look like himself, having undergone plastic surgery at some point in the Unit after walking away from a Paris conference and disappearing into thin air, much to the annoyance of the British and French security agencies.

Given the Cold War realities of the early 1950s, the expectation is that he’s walked into the arms of the Soviets — he and a number of other brilliant scientists who have similarly disappeared in recent years. But no one can be sure.

Nearly a year after his disappearance, Betterton’s wife Olive tells Mr. Jessop, a British intelligence agent, that she needs to go on a vacation to Casablanca to clear her head. Jessop plans to have her followed in hopes of discovering her husband, but, on the way, her plane crashes, leaving her with fatal injuries.

Even as she is lingering near death in her hospital bed, Jessop finds a possible substitute — Hilary Craven, a deeply depressed redhead who has come to Casablanca to commit suicide.

She had borne her own long illness, she had borne Nigel’s defection and the cruel and brutal circumstances in which it had operated.  She had borne these things because there was Brenda. Then had come the long, slow, losing fight for Brenda’s life — the final defeat….Now there was nothing to live for any longer.

 

“Why did you recognize me?”

Jessop convinces Hilary that a better plan for suicide — and one with a positive aspect to it — would be to take Olive’s place and help the British and French agents find Olive’s husband and the other missing geniuses.

In addition to their red hair, the two women are generally similar in physique, and Jessop tells Hilary that the shadowy characters with the job of linking up with Olive and taking her to her husband aren’t likely to know what she looks like.

With nothing to lose, Hilary agrees to masquerade as Olive, and, then, as the adventure unfolds, she regains her zest for life and has no desire any more to die.  Thus, when presented to her “husband,” Hilary is desperately afraid the jig is up so she’s astonished to be greeted as Olive.

“Why did you recognize me as your wife?”

That’s what she asks on the rooftop after Betterton demands to know who she is. And he answers that he wants to escape from the Unit and hoped that she had been sent to free him. Hilary promises to get them both out of their “earthly paradise” prison.

 

The world of mysteries

During the course of her long career as a writer (1920-1976), Christie cranked out 73 novels, most of them detective mysteries. Every once in a while, she’d write a spy story, like So Many Steps to Death. But her spy books weren’t like other espionage novels.

In the 1950s, the spy genre in publishing was moving toward a grittier, more realistic and morally ambiguous approach, culminating in John Le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), but So Many Steps to Death isn’t at all gritty, not terribly realistic, and the British and French agents are clearly the good guys.

In fact, the world of the novel is very much the world of Christie’s murder mysteries, a never-never-land where people are identified often through their place in society and act like figures in a play that’s psychologically superficial and not very demanding on the audience.

It’s an attractive sort of place that the reader is views from a seat just off stage. And the center of everything is, even in the spy books, a puzzle.

 

Complicated story

So Many Steps to Death is a highly complicated story with a cast of more than a dozen characters, many of them hiding their real identities.

One, Mrs. Calvin Baker, pretends to be a voluble American tourist in her job as liaison between those scientists fleeing from their old lives and her bosses at the Unit. Another, Helga Needheim, an arrogant German Fascist, dresses as a nun. The Director seems to run the Unit but doesn’t. Mr. Aristides, perhaps the wealthiest person in the world, appears at first to be a lonely old man but, later, looks “like a small yellow toad” and turns out to be the moral equivalent.

The puzzle is Tom Betterton’s disappearance and, later, the true nature of the Unit. Those puzzles are solved in the novel, and, then, in the final pages, there is the solution of a mystery that the reader didn’t know was a mystery.

 

Pepper a book with plot twists

That’s one of many nice touches to So Many Steps to Death. Christie wasn’t very strong on realism, but she could pepper a book with plot twists that are pleasurably unexpected and entertaining.

One such twist has to do with the method that Mrs. Baker and the Unit’s minions use to free Hilary from anyone trying to track her.

So as not to ruin the surprise, I won’t describe the method, but, suddenly Hilary finds herself with five acquaintances all heading to their new lives together. And she’s astonished.

“But surely—” It was Dr. Barron now who spoke to her. “But surely you know where we are going?”

Mrs. Baker, drawing near, said cheerfully, “Of course she knows. But maybe she didn’t expect it quite so soon.”

Hilary said, after a short bewildered pause, “But you mean — all of us?” She looked round.

“We’re fellow travelers,” said Peters gently.

The young Norwegian, nodding his head, said with an almost fanatical enthusiasm, “Yes, we are all fellow travelers.”

Of course, in the early 1950s, “fellow travelers” was a term used in democratic countries for Communists. So, there’s an ironic pun that the characters are using here with Hilary.

But, then, the story Christie unfolds is less straightforward than the “fellow travelers” term seems to imply. Another twist.

 

 

Patrick T. Reardon

11.28.25