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 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...
9 comments
Read more

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