Imagine nine tourists cooped up on a small, light-draft boat on the Nile, hot and uncomfortable by day, cold by night, suddenly thrown into panic by the knowledge that one of them is a murderer; that even if he desired to, the desperate brute could not leave the boat because of the barrenness of the land about them. So they must associate with the criminal until they could get back to more-populated country.
The first murder was that of a beautiful girl as she stood before the hideous statue of Anubis, King of the Dead, in the Sudan, with its rock-hewn tombs of ancient Egypt. Her death was due to the bite of a deadly asp, which had been placed in her jacket pocket. Then came the murder of a native deck steward, who seemingly knew too much. And still there was no actual knowledge of who had been the criminal. Each passenger suspected his or her neighbor, even the captain coming under suspicion. And it remained for a young girl, a girl with a newspaper training, to eventually solve the hideous mystery. [Mrs.] McKinley has made her story one that is terribly realistic, with much of the enchantment and mystery of Africa, flavoring the tense excitement. (Boston Globe, 1933)
F. Burks McKinley was the pseudonym of Mary Frances Burks (1907-1970). Born in Dyer County, Tennessee, Burks attended high school in Nashville and graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1929, receiving a prestigious Founder’s Medal, and on the same day she wed academic scholar Silas Bent McKinley. In 1933, she dedicated Death Sails the Nile, which drew on experiences from her honeymoon, to Professor McKinley, although the couple divorced in 1935. Burks, who reclaimed her family name, never remarried nor published another detective novel, despite the wide praise Death Sails the Nile received.
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