Poirot Retrospective #21: Sad Cypress

 

Poirot Retrospective #21: Sad Cypress

This was a weird and fascinating one, and I can see why Christie scholars/experts rate it fairly highly. That said, I don't think I enjoyed it all that much.

The book has a curious four-part structure: Part 1, the first third, is all setup, about two cousins (the girl loves the guy; he isn't sure) who go to visit their rich-and-dying aunt. Aunt has a very young and gorgeous companion she showers with attention. Boy cousin falls for companion. Girl cousin becomes coldly furious.

Then all hell breaks loose: aunt dies suddenly. She was sick, but still. Then companion is poisoned. All clues point towards girl cousin! She is arrested. The local doctor, smitten with girl cousin, hires Poirot.

Part 2 is where Poirot investigates and slowly, methodically unearths truth after truth about the whole messed up situation.

Part 3 is the court case against the girl cousin, and is told entirely as a dialog between lawyers and various witnesses - which is really interesting and perhaps the best part of the book. Certainly the most unusual.

Part 4 is the expected denouement, where Poirot laboriously recounts his thought process for the local doctor who hired him, and how exactly he arrived at the correct solution.

All that is well and good - but I found the characters quite unappealing, the crime unexciting, the solution unusually far-fetched, and the whole four-part structure very herky-jerky and forced. It just didn't click with me. The worst part - the cardinal sin - is that the second murder victim (the companion) is quite poorly and hastily sketched and so you don't particularly care that she dies. Yuck.

Worse still, I felt the clues were hidden from the reader in such a way that no one could legitimately guess the real solution. You'd have to be psychic.

So... a mixed bag that's mostly negative for me. The writing is fine, and it moves along at a nice enough pace, and it's not too long, but it just didn't do it for me. I'd put it more or less a couple notches below the middle of the road.