Sad Cypress (by Agatha Christie)

(Amazon UK link)

I felt like reading one of our large collection of Agatha Christie books, and found a few that I had not previously read. I have no idea how we acquired ‘Sad Cypress’ but as far as I know I had never read it. I picked it up last night, and found it so engrossing that I finished it this afternoon.

This book has an interesting construction, one which I don’t recall from previous novels by this author. It opens with a scene in a courtroom. Elinor, a young woman, is accused of murdering another woman called Mary. She pleads ‘not guilty’...

The story then moves back a month or two, and we meet Elinor chatting to her cousin-by-marriage and fiance Roderick. She loves him deeply but he’s a reserved kind of person so she tries to mask her emotions. Elinor has just received an anonymous hand-written note telling her that she needs to check up on her aunt, as someone else is trying to worm her way into her affections.

Elinor’s aunt has been ill for a while, so she and Roddy go to see her, and tell her of their engagement. It’s something she has always wanted - Roderick is her late husband’s nephew - so she’s very pleased. She is attended by two nurses and a cheerful doctor pops in and out - and he’s rather taken with Elinor.

Mary is someone Elinor and Roddy remember from their childhood, who lived in the lodge of Elinor’s aunt’s house. The aunt always took an interest in her, and paid for her education - which has left Mary in a bit of an awkward situation, back in the era when ‘class’ was determined by birth, and someone from the working classes was not supposed to be well-educated and charming. Mary has rejected a local young man who likes her, but when Roderick is captivated by her, she refuses to have anything to do with him while he’s engaged to Elinor. She wants, in any case, to train as a nurse or masseuse.

Although Agatha Christie was not great at characterisation, she could tell an excellent story, and this one is very well-written. The prologue had told me that Mary was going to be murdered, and that Elinor was going to be accused - and the story moves forward cleverly indicting Elinor at each point. I was fairly sure that there were a lot of red herrings, and that she would not in fact be guilty. But then I started to wonder; this author is good at double-bluffing; perhaps, I thought, Elinor really IS guilty.

Hercule Poirot gets involved, at the request of the doctor who suspects that Elinor might be guilty but wants anything that might demonstrate her innocence. And even if she is guilty, he wants Poirot to find out if any reasonable doubt can be cast over the case. It seems like an impossible situation: everything points to her being the only person who could possibly have done the deed. But is the evidence just too strong? Has someone ‘planted’ the clues…? And if she didn’t do it - and another crime, that becomes apparent part-way through the investigations - then who did?

Sometimes I get an inkling of ‘whodunit’ when I read Agatha Christie’s books. In this, I had no idea at all. When Poirot announces that all the people he had spoken to had lied to him, I guessed one or two of the incidents, but not all of them, and not those essential to the plot. And I still didn’t know whether or not Elinor was guilty…

As ever with this writer, the plot is clever, the clues and red herrings neatly in place, and an excellent story is told. I had no idea why the book is called ‘Sad Cypress’; apparently it’s a quotation from ‘Twelfth Night’.

Definitely recommended if you like light mid-century crime fiction with no gore, and don’t mind a fair amount of both legal and medical jargon.  As with most of Agatha Christie's novels, this one remains almost constantly in print and can also fairly easily be found second-hand.

Review copyright 2020 Sue's Book Reviews