Sad cypress - Agatha Christie [88]
If Sad Cypress has a flaw, it is in the weakness and clumsiness of the exposition, immediately after the Prologue. But once it gets into its stride, this is one of the most real, least schematic of crime novels. It is also unusual in that it employs the device of the possible miscarriage of justice, a miscarriage averted, in this case, by Hercule Poirot. British justice, in the works of Agatha Christie, is rarely allowed to be thought likely to make a mistake.
In addition to those qualities which might seem to place it outside the genre of the traditional crime novel, Sad Cypress also works, and works superbly, as a murder mystery. The clues are most ingeniously placed, Mrs Christie’s veneniferous knowledge is well to the fore but is never used to daunt the reader who is less well up in poisons, and the rather sad but very real mood which permeates the entire novel in no way weakens the mystery element. The characters are convincing, and stay in the memory, and the actual writing is, as almost invariably with Agatha Christie, easy and natural. A comparison with Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers, a 1930 murder mystery which is also about a young woman charged with murder by poison, and which also contains courtroom scenes, reveals Christie to be far ahead of Sayers in pace, atmosphere, credibility and sheer readability.
Interviewed by Francis Wyndham a quarter of a century later, Agatha Christie said: ‘Sad Cypress could have been good, but it was quite ruined by having Poirot in it. I always thought something was wrong with it but didn’t discover what until I read it again sometime after.’2 Perhaps she regretted not having written it as a Mary Westmacott novel. Nevertheless, Poirot does not seem an excrescence. He is called in by Peter Lord, the young doctor, to prove Elinor Carlisle innocent: ‘I’ve heard Stillingfleet talk about you; he’s told me what you did in that Benedict Farley case,’ Lord says to Poirot. The reference is to the short story, ‘The Dream’,3 in which Poirot discovered the murderer of Benedict Farley, an eccentric millionaire. (Stillingfleet is known to Peter Lord, presumably because they are in the same profession. At the end of ‘The Dream’, Dr John Stillingfleet, ‘a tall, long-faced young man of thirty’, appeared to be contemplating the courtship of the millionaire’s daughter. He will be encountered again in Third Girl [1966]. In that novel he marries someone else.)
About Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in 100 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Mrs Christie is the author of eighty crime novels and short story collections, nineteen plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.
Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was written towards the end of World War I (during which she served in the Voluntary Aid Detachments). In it she created Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian investigator who was destined to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. After having been rejected by a number of houses, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was eventually published by The Bodley Head in 1920.
In 1926, now averaging a book a year, Agatha Christie wrote her masterpiece. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was the first of her books to be published by William Collins and marked the beginning of an author-publisher relationship that lasted for fifty years and produced over seventy books. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was also the first of Agatha Christie’s works to be dramatised—as Alibi—and to have a successful run in London’s West End. The Mousetrap, her most famous play, opened in 1952 and runs to this day at St Martin’s Theatre in the West End; it is the longest-running play in history.
Agatha Christie was made a Dame in 1971. She died in 1976, since when a number of