In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

OCEAN LINERS 165
I will confess to you that it was my greatest stumbling block, when I
found that a call had actually been put through from King's Abbot
station. I at first believed that you had simply invented the story. It was
a very clever touch, that ... I had a very vague notion of how it was
worked when I came to see your sister that first day and inquired as to
what patients you had seen on Friday morning ... Among your patients
that morning was the steward of an American liner. Who more
suitable than he to be leaving for Liverpool by the train that evening?
And afterwards he would be on the high seas, well out of the way. I
noted that the Orion sailed on Saturday, and having obtained the name
of the steward I sent him a wireless message asking a certain question.
This is his reply you saw me receive just now.
Of course the content of the telephone call, which, under some pretext,
Sheppard asks his American patient to put through to him, has nothing
to do with the crime. But its function in Christie's novel reveals the
ambiguities and liminalities of traveling on ocean liners. Passengers on
ocean liners are indeed "well out of the way," beyond the reach of the
law and of many other everyday constraints. The world of ocean linersa
world without stable ground-is an unreal world. [see Uncertainty vs.
Reality] This is why Sheppard can legitimately hope that the steward
who sails on the Orion will never testify against him. But passengers on
ocean liners are out of the everyday world only for a limited time, and,
given the latest developments in communications technology [see Wireless
Communication], they are never totally unreachable. Poirot's exchange
of wireless messages with the steward, who has unwittingly come
to play such an important part in Sheppard's plot, leads to the conviction
of the murderer.
The specific forms of experience associated with this ambiguous situation
of being simultaneously out of and in the world depend to a great
extent on whether a passenger's cabin is located on an upper deck or a
lower deck-so much so, indeed, that life on an ocean liner has become
an allegory for social injustice. In his poem "Seefahrer" ("Seafarer"),
Johannes Becher plays out multiple aspects of the contrast between these
two groups of passengers:
The giant ship-quietly humming turbines;
the ocean thunders as it spurts.