Destination Unknown is a work of spy fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on 1 November 1954 and in US by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1955 under the title of So Many Steps to Death. The UK edition retailed at ten shillings and sixpence and the US edition at $2.75. It is one of the five Christie novels to have not received an adaptation of any kind, the others being Death Comes as the End, Passenger to Frankfurt, They Came to Baghdad, and Postern of Fate.
Plot summary
Hilary Craven, a deserted wife and bereaved mother, is planning suicide in a Moroccan hotel, when she is asked by British secret agent Jessop to undertake a dangerous mission as an alternative to taking an overdose of sleeping pills. The task, which she accepts, is to impersonate the wife of Thomas Betterton, a nuclear scientist who has disappeared and may have defected to the Soviet Union. Soon she finds herself in a group of oddly-assorted travellers being transported to the unknown destination of the title. The destination turns out to be a secret scientific research facility disguised as a modern leper colony and medical research center at a remote location in the Atlas Mountains. The scientists are well-treated, but they are not allowed to leave the facility, and they are locked in secret areas deep inside the mountain whenever government officials and other outsiders visit. Hilary Craven successfully passes herself as Betterton's wife Olive, because he is miserable and wants desperately to escape. Hilary discovers that the facility was built by the fabulously wealthy and somewhat villainous Mr Aristides, for financial rather than political ends. He has lured the world's best young scientists to it with various deceptions so that he can later sell their services back to the world's governments and corporations for a huge profit. She falls in love with Andrew Peters, a handsome young American who was in the group with her on their journey to the facility. With the help of clues she has left along the way, Jessop eventually locates and rescues her and the others held there. Peters turns out also to be on a mission, intent on bringing Betterton to justice for the murder of his first wife. Betterton, revealed to also be a scientific fraud who plagiarized his work, is arrested. Hilary no longer wants to die, and she and Peters are free to begin their life together.
Characters
Mr Jessop, a British security agent
Thomas Betterton, a young scientist who has recently disappeared
Olive Betterton, his wife who wishes to join him
Boris Glydr, the Polish cousin of Thomas Betterton's deceased first wife, Elsa
Mrs Calvin Baker, a seemingly typical American tourist, who is actually a major player in the events that unfold, and harbors great resentment and hatred for her native country
Janet Hetherington, a dour English traveller, really a British agent
Henri Laurier, a gallant Frenchman
Mr Aristides, one of the world's wealthiest men with his hands in many different pots worldwide
Andrew Peters, a young research chemist
Torquil Ericsson, a Norwegian idealist
Dr Louis Barron, a Frenchman dedicated to bacteriological research
Helga Needheim, an arrogant German scientist
Paul Van Heidem, a social manager at the facility
Dr Nielson, the Deputy Director, in charge of administration
The Director, a charismatic speaker employed by Aristides
M. LeBlanc, a French investigator
Major themes
This book explores the 1950s subject of defection to the Soviets, but it also demonstrates how the break-up of Christie's first marriage in the 1920s remained with her. Like her 1934 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.
Literary significance and reception
The Times Literary Supplement in its review, written by Philip John Stead, of 19 November 1954, was enthusiastic when it asked, "Where do scientists go when they vanish from the ken of the Security Services? A solution to this fascinating problem is propounded in Destination Unknown. While it must be admitted that the secret, when disclosed, smacks rather of The Thousand and One Nights than of modern international rivalry for scientific talents, it may surely be excused on the ground that it provides Mrs. Christie with a story-tellers holiday from the rigours of detective fiction. Readers may regret the absence of the tonic logicalities of crime's unravelling – though "clues" are not altogether missing – for the secret service story belongs largely to Adventure, but in their place is the author's obvious pleasure in the wider horizons of the more romantic genre." The review concluded, "However much the purist yearns for Poirot or Miss Marple, he can hardly deplore Mrs. Christie's bright, busy excursion into this topical and extravagant sphere." Maurice Richardson of The Observer of 31 October 1954, said, "The thriller is not Agatha Christie's forte; it makes her go all breathless and naïve." He concluded, "Needs to be read indulgently in a very comfortable railway carriage. She probably had a delicious busman's holiday writing it." Robert Barnard wrote, "Slightly above-average thriller, with excellent beginning. Thereafter topples over into hokum, with a notably unexciting climax. Mainly concerns disappearing scientists – it is written in the wake of the Fuchs/Pontecorvo affairs. Mentions the un-American Activities Committee, without obvious disapproval."
Publication history
1954, Collins Crime Club, 1 November 1954, Hardback, 192 pp
1977, Greenway edition of collected works, Hardcover, 196 pp
1978, Greenway edition of collected works, Hardcover, 196 pp
May 1983, Pocket Books, paperback, 237 pp,
In the UK the novel was first serialised in the weekly magazine John Bull in five abridged instalments from 25 September to 23 October 1954 with illustrations by William Little. The novel was first serialised in the US in the Chicago Tribune in fifty-one parts from Tuesday, 12 April to Thursday 9 June 1955 under the title of Destination X.
