Attempted killing of Linnet Doyle with a boulder

The attempted killing of Linnet Doyle with a boulder at Abu Simbel was a prior, unsuccessful attack whose apparent accident became a crucial clue in the murder investigation. The later inquiry established that the danger to Linnet had begun before the events aboard the Karnak and that Jacqueline de Bellefort was not responsible for this attempt.

Setting and Circumstances

The boulder came crashing down at Abu Simbel, where Linnet narrowly escaped. Andrew Pennington was inside the Temple of Abu Simbel at the time; he said he heard about the incident afterward and had not witnessed it himself. His distance from the event left him able to describe what he had been told, but not to confirm how the boulder came to fall.

At first, the incident could be regarded as an accident. When Poirot later raised it with Pennington, however, he recalled that someone aboard the Karnak had an interest in removing Linnet and invited Pennington to reconsider the earlier near miss. The question was no longer simply how close Linnet had come to danger, but whether the danger had been deliberately created.

Reassessment as an Attempt

The investigation came to treat the boulder incident as an attempted killing, not an accident. Race explicitly distinguished the earlier attempt from the later murder and stated that the person responsible for the boulder attack was not Jacqueline de Bellefort. This ruled out the most obvious suspect in the conflict surrounding Linnet without identifying the person who had actually endangered her.

Poirot’s reasoning connected the attack to the wider intention to remove Linnet. The boulder was therefore not just a dramatic near miss in her travels: in retrospect, it indicated that someone had already tried to kill her before the murder aboard the Karnak. The assailant’s identity remained unresolved in the evidence concerning this event.

Place in the Investigation

The attack altered the meaning of the later crime by showing that the threat to Linnet predated the murder scene. Poirot and Race initially approached the murder as an unplanned act made possible by an opportunity to frame Jacqueline; Poirot later acknowledged that this starting assumption was wrong and described the murder as carefully planned and timed. The earlier boulder attempt belongs to the pattern that forced the investigators to reconsider a seemingly straightforward explanation, though the evidence here does not establish exactly how its planning related to each later step.

The incident’s importance rests on the contrast between its first appearance and its later interpretation: a near accident at Abu Simbel became evidence of an earlier attempt on Linnet’s life. Its unanswered question—who had arranged the attack—helped expose the limits of blaming Jacqueline merely because the circumstances of the later murder appeared to point toward her.