Skip to main content

Review: Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie

This novel opens where one might expect a legal drama to begin: at a criminal arraignment. Elinor Carlisle stands accused of the murder of another young woman: Mary Gerrard. The story then flashes back to the events leading up to this scene, hopping from one character to another to show various viewpoints, including that of the murdered woman and of Elinor, who is shown to have had more than one reason for wanting Mary dead. All the evidence points to her having done it, but one man doubts it so strongly that he contacts Hercule Poirot and sets him the task of proving Elinor‘s innocence. But Poirot is not so easily ordered around, and he sets out to discover the true circumstances of the murder, whoever the murderer might be, because, as he says: „I do not approve of murder.“

Unlike my previous Christie read, Murder at the Vicarage, this story has very little humour in it and isn‘t at all frothy, like some of Christie‘s other mysteries. The beginning could be mistaken for the start of a juicy melodrama, but fortunately it develops instead into a psychological thriller, posing the question: Did she or didn‘t she?

This story is more emotionally involved than those in many – I might even say most – of Christie‘s other books. The third person omniscient narrator allows the reader a look into the heads of some of the characters (rare for Christie, who usually saves that sort of thing for her first person narrators, who then tend to recount observations and express opinions rather than emotions). One of those characters is Elinor, who is shown to be a passionate young woman, equally capable of deep love and blazing hatred, but able to hide her feelings under a somewhat frosty exterior.

The cast of characters is small and the suspects are even fewer, and most are drawn with a deft hand and shown to have some depth, with the exception of the Irish nurse who is a veritable stereotype of both her profession and her nationality. Clues are, for the most part, laid out fair and square, but it will require skill and knowledge if the reader wishes to get to the truth before Poirot reveals all.

Final words: This is one of the better Christie mysteries I have read – I wouldn‘t hesitate to place it in the top 10 of my favorites among her books.
Labels:

Comments

Christina T said…
I read this one years ago after seeing a film version with David Suchet's Poirot. I need to reread Agatha Christie sometime. I mostly read her books as a teen about 20 years ago so it would be good to read them from the perspective of an adult.

Nice review!
October 02, 2016 5:25 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down
Post a Comment
Read more

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove
Post a Comment
Read more

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme
Post a Comment
Read more