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off all around us’, they were about to move into their house in Sheffield Terrace, the people to whom they had rented it having asked if they could be allowed to relinquish the lease, as they wished to leave London. Max, to his great joy, managed to get a job in the Intelligence branch of the Royal Air Force, and went off to work every day at the Air Ministry. When the Sheffield Terrace house was bombed, the Mallowans moved to a modern block of flats in Lawn Road, Hampstead, not far from the Heath. Agatha went to work as a dispenser again, this time at University College Hospital, and Max was sent to the Middle East, where his knowledge of Arabic could be put to good use. He was seconded to the British military authorities in North Africa, to act as Adviser on Arab affairs in Tripolitania.

Unable to travel, and unhappy at her husband’s absence, Agatha spent all her free time writing: detective novels and stories, plays, Mary Westmacott novels, and memoirs of the archaeological expeditions she and Max had been on together. She had agreed to allow her Poirot novel, Peril at End House, to be dramatized by Arnold Ridley. The play (see pp. 96–7) opened on tour early in 1940, and came to the Vaudeville theatre, in the Strand, London, on 1 May, with Francis L. Sullivan as Poirot. ‘Larry’ Sullivan was an old friend of Agatha Christie, and had first played Poirot in Black Coffee in 1930.

Two Poirot novels were published during 1940: Sad Cypress and One, Two, Buckle My Shoe.

The song in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night from which Sad Cypress derives its title is printed at the beginning of the novel:

Come away, come away, death,

And in sad cypress let me be laid;

Fly away, fly away, breath:

I am slain by a fair cruel maid.

My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,

Oh! prepare it.

My part of death no one so true

Did share it.

Surely the reader is not being given a clue, is not being told to scrutinize closely every fair cruel maid he encounters in the course of the novel?

A prologue describes Elinor Carlisle in court, pleading not guilty to the charge of having murdered Mary Gerrard. As the prosecuting attorney for the Crown begins his case, and the ghoulish spectators lean forward, ‘listening with a kind of slow, cruel relish to what that tall man with the Jewish nose was saying about her’, Elinor allows her mind to go back to the day she received an illiterate anonymous letter warning her that ‘there’s Someone sucking up to your Aunt and if you’re not kareful you’ll get Cut out of Everything’.

A melodramatic and unpromising beginning, but it is the beginning not only of an engrossing Hercule Poirot case but also of a novel which could easily have become not a Christie but a Westmacott. In few other Agatha Christie murder mysteries does harsh reality intrude as frequently as in Sad Cypress with its very real and curiously sympathetic characters, and its moving descriptions of the pain and indignity of old age and illness. Elinor’s elderly Aunt Laura is a helpless invalid after suffering a stroke, mentally alert but physically incapable of looking after herself. Told that she might live on for many years, she replies: ‘I’m not at all anxious to, thank you! I told [the doctor] the other day that, in a decently civilized state, all there would be to do would be for me to intimate to him that I wished to end it, and he’d finish me off painlessly with some nice drug.’ Aunt Laura is finished off by someone, with morphine. Another death follows soon afterwards.

The arguments for and against euthanasia are fleetingly but fairly rehearsed: our impression is that Mrs Christie’s sympathies are with the doctor, who says that ‘one’s got an instinct to live. One doesn’t live because one’s reason assents to living. People who, as we say, would be better dead, don’t want to die.’1 The distress of Laura Welman’s relatives at the old lady’s helplessness, the ashamed inability of one of them to face visits to her sick-room, and, after her death, the conflicting feelings of sadness, relief and cupidity felt by more than one of the surviving