Death in the Clouds

Death in the Clouds was a murder mystery novel by Agatha Christie which was first published in 1935. It was one of Christie's Hercule Poirot novels.

Inside page noting date of publication of Death in the Clouds as 5,000,000,000 (TV: The Unicorn and the Wasp)

Part of the novel's plot (involving a wasp) may have been subconsciously influenced by an adventure Christie shared with the Tenth Doctor and Donna Noble. It was one of a number of Christie's works to be preserved through human history, with an edition owned by the Doctor carrying a publishing date of the year 5 billion. (TV: The Unicorn and the Wasp)

Behind the scenes

In The Writer's Tale, Russell T Davies recalls that he and scriptwriter Gareth Roberts were having trouble working out the monster Agatha Christie would face in The Unicorn and the Wasp:

"We really couldn't think what sort of enemy she should fight. Dickens? Ghosts. Shakespeare? Witches. But Agatha...? Then Gareth came up with a wasp — and I remembered the old paperback cover of Death in the Clouds, which has a plane being attacked by a symbolically giant wasp. 'That'll do', we said. Our most tenuous link yet."