Sad Cypress audiobook

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,O, prepare it!My part of death, no one so trueDid share it.Shakespeare: Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene IV “And suddenly, for a vivid minute, Hercule Poirot had a new conception of the dead girl. In that halting rustic voice the girl Mary lived and bloomed again. "She was like a flower."There was suddenly a poignant sense of loss, of something exquisite destroyed. In his mind phrase after phrase succeeded each other. Peter Lord's "She was a nice kid." Nurse Hopkins's "She could have gone on the films any time." Mrs. Bishop's venomous "No patience with her airs and graces." And now last, putting to shame, laying aside those other views, the quiet, wondering, "She was like a flower.”Sad Cypress was the first Poirot story set for quite a large part in the courtroom and depicting the legal procedure where we already have a defendant and prosecution/defense counselors presenting the (a) solution of the crime to a judge and jury. Poirot himself actually puts in an appearance only in the second half of the novel. (Perry Mason in Britain? HA-HA! Possibly.)Later Agatha Christie admitted that he was not strictly necessary to unfold the mystery and while partly I agree with her, I love this little Belgian too much to resent/regret it and the book still has a solid place in my Agatha Christie Top 5. Seemingly we are presented a classic love triangle, but as the story progresses it turns into a rectangle where A loves B, who gets infatuated over C, who does not care for B in return and then we get a D who falls in love with A. :)As always, Agatha Christie offers deep insight of character and human nature in general. I love how she plays her caleidoscope-game with us, showing how her characters see each other and offering a constantly changing pattern which makes us re-evaluate our own views of them and where the solution is staring back at us among the colourful shards. Thankfully, we also have Poirot to interpret/discover the real pattern.

A courtroom drama told in flashbacks, mostly through the eyes of the accused.Elinor Carlisle hated Mary Gerrard.Why?Because the love of her (entire) life, Roddy Welman, took one look at Mary's beautiful face and broke off his engagement to her.Ouch. My goodness, that stings.So when her aunt dies after telling her that she wanted Mary provided for, but legally leaves everything to Elinor, what's a girl to do?If you're Elinor, you grit your teeth, give her £2,000, and hope she hits the road.OR!Maybe you hand her a plate of poisoned sandwiches. I'll bet you can guess what Elinor is on trial for, right? Fortunately, the village doctor is in love with her, and so he begs Poirot to find evidence to prove her innocence. Now, he's personally willing to lie and doesn't really care if she offed poor Mary or not. But Poirot does.Unfortunately, every bit of evidence Poirot uncovers seems to point right back to Elinor as the most likely killer. And as a reader, Elinor's inner monologue doesn't do much to convince you one way or the other as to whether or not she did it. But if Elinor isn't a cold blooded murderer, then who is?No worries, random Goodreader.As always, Hercule Poirot will defend the innocent and shine a light on the guilty. Without giving spoilers, all I can say is that I did not see the bad guy coming. Another excellent, if not very well known, story by the Queen of Mystery.Recommended!

Agatha Christie Book Reading ChallengeBOOK 26 :- JAN 20214 STARS

Sad Cypress (Hercule Poirot #22), Agatha ChristieSad Cypress is a work of detective fiction by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in March 1940. Beautiful young Elinor Carlisle stood serenely in the dock, accused of the murder of Mary Gerrard, her rival in love. The evidence was damning: only Elinor had the motive, the opportunity and the means to administer the fatal poison. Yet, inside the hostile courtroom, only one man still presumed Elinor was innocent until proven guilty: Hercule Poirot was all that stood between Elinor and the gallows...Characters: Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective; Mrs Laura Welman; Mary Gerrard; Elinor Carlisle; Roderick 'Roddy'; Dr Peter Lord; Nurse Jessie Hopkins; Nurse Eileen O'Brien; Mrs Bishop; Horlick; Ephraim 'Bob' Gerrard; Eliza Gerrard; Sir Lewis Rycroft; Ted Bigland; Mrs Slattery; and ...عنوانها: «سرو غمگین»؛ «ارثیه شوم»؛ «پوارو در هانتربری»؛ نویسنده: آگاتا کریستی؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: ماه سپتامبر سال 1993میلادیعنوان: سرو غمگین؛ نویسنده: آگاتا کریستی؛ مترجم: میمنت دانا؛ تهران، 1346؛ در 236ص؛ موضوع: داستانهای پلیسی و معمایی و کارآگاهی از نویسندگان انگلیسی - سده 20معنوان: ارثیه شوم (سرو غمگین): از عملیات کارآگاه مشهور جهان هرکول پوارو؛ نویسنده: آگاتا کریستی؛ مترجم: علیرضا نعمتی؛ تهران، افشار، 1372؛ در 176ص؛ شابک 9646402585؛عنوان: سرو غمگین؛ نویسنده: آگاتا کریستی؛ مترجم: بهرام افراسیابی؛ تهران، راد، 1372؛ در 287ص؛ چاپ دیگر تهران، پازند، 1378، در 287ص؛ شابک 9649250980؛چاپ دیگر تهران، مهرفام، 1389، در 297ص؛ شابک 9789649915067؛عنوان: ارثیه شوم؛ نویسنده: آگاتا کریستی؛ مترجم: بهرام افراسیابی؛ تهران، مهتاب، 1373؛ در 101ص؛ عنوان: سرو غمگین؛ نویسنده: آگاتا کریستی؛ مترجم محمد گذرآبادی؛ تهران، هرمس؛ کارآگاه، چاپ نخست 1388؛ چاپ دوم 1392؛ در 278ص؛ شابک 9789643636296؛رمان یکی از معماهایی را روایت می‌کند، که کارآگاه افسانه‌ ای «هرکول پوآرو»، برای گشایش آن اقدام می‌کند؛ «سرو غمگین» در سال 1940میلادی، برای نخستین بار به چاپ رسیده است؛ «الینور کارلایل» نامه‌ ای از فردی ناشناس دریافت می‌کند، که میگوید عمه اش شیفته ی پرستار جوانش شده‌ است؛ نام پرستار «آماری جرارد» است؛ «الینور» موضوع را با «رودی» نامزدش مطرح می‌کند، و تصمیم میگیرند به «هانتریری» بروند و در آنجا….؛تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 08/06/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی

Sad Cypress is the 21st book in the Hercule Poirot series written by Agatha Christie. The book was published in 1940, but this series can be read out of order. I chose this book with my friend Medhat as a buddy read this month. I've seen several film and tv adaptations of Christie's books, but I've never caught this one. I'm on a kick to read them all in the next year.Sad Cypress is your classic tale. An elderly woman dies of seemingly natural causes. She was about to change her will, possibly naming a local girl who visited her from time to time as her beneficiary. She might have still included her niece and nephew by marriage, but we're uncertain. Then, the local girl ends up dead even if she didn't get to inherit any money because the original will was never finished. What's going on? Who wanted the money? And how does everyone fit together? Throw in two nurses, a housekeeper, a gardener, a doctor, and the niece and nephew... and those are all your suspects. Christie isn't usually someone to bring in a random at the end, so we are fairly certain it's one of these folks.What a clever tale! I was immediately drawn into the plot from the beginning. We divided it into thirds so we could read over three days. I actually had to read it early in the morning because I wanted to get back to it quickly each day. While there was a bit of repetition during the deduction phase, Poirot always makes you laugh, so it's easily ignored. Christie makes you believe her characters are telling the truth only to shock you later with a lie and a twist. It always makes sense, and you wonder how the truth could hide in plain sight. Of course, it's a little over-the-top, but that's this style in general. I love it, so I'm not complaining -- just pointing it out for others, so they know what they're getting themselves into. It's over 75 years old!How does Poirot figure it out! He has a few off-screen conversations and relays them to us later, which is helpful. The imagery is powerful, and the concept of the cypress is simple but strong. The dialog is strong even for being formatted differently than modern readers are used to. It's full of fantastic suspense and drama moments, urging you to keep reading until you stop. While not in her top 5 for me, it's certainly a compelling story with a lot of meandering paths that lead back to a conclusion. 4.5 stars. I think I want to read Mouse Trap next, as I've not seen the play or read the story.

“A little difficult to know where you were with Elinor. She didn't reveal much of what she thought and felt about things. He liked that about her. He hated people who reeled off their thoughts and feelings to you, who took it for granted that you wanted to know all their mechanisms. Reserve was always more interesting”―Rodney “The human face is, after all, nothing more nor less than a mask”―ChristieThe title comes from a song from Act II, Scene IV of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night which is printed as an epigraph to 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,O, prepare it!My part of death, no one so trueDid share it.Rodney, betrothed to Elinor, has fallen in love with Mary! A broken engagement and flashes of (understated, this IS Elinor, after all) jealous rage. Motive! The cool exterior of Elinor, what lies beneath it? The evidence against her is damning! But all may not be what it seems! (of course). Enter Poirot!Making my steady but inexorable way through the corpus of Christie’s Poirot whodunnits, I have almost always been entertained. But then there are so many of them, you can see books that are less well-crafted than others, you get caught up in patterns and rhythms and occasionally predictable moments. This book has them, the Poirot arrogant claim of brilliance, the occasional anti-semitic remark, the poison pen letter, but the particular delights and the surprise twists in this one raise it to be one of the better ones in the series for me. This volume is especially carefully plotted, thoughtfully written, but what’s new? Well, for one, it opens with the trial of Elinor Carlisle for the murder of Mary Gerrad, who was "like a flower." Christie never did that before, and it compels her to work in flashback to unravel the crime. That original approach (for her, for sure!) makes the telling particularly entertaining. I hadn't even heard of this one before, but I admire its ingenuity! There's not a lot of quotable lines and maybe not enough crazy characters, but it is still very good!

Murder by poison! Love or greed ... or both?Elinor Carlisle, a sensible, well educated young woman, and her distant cousin, Roddy Welman, a somewhat less well focused amiable gentleman - perhaps even a bit of a dandy - are happily engaged. They both know they are living somewhat beyond their means but they take comfort in their expectation of the inheritance of a very sizable fortune from their elderly aunt, Laura Welman. When they receive an anonymous mean-spirited letter suggesting that someone is cozying up to their aunt and worming their way into her affections, Elinor suspects young Mary Gerrard, her aunt's lodge-keeper's daughter. Rationalizing with one another that they really ought to be making a greater effort to see their aunt more frequently, Elinor and Roddy quickly pack up for a visit to Mrs Welman with a concerned view to protecting their interests in the estate.During the course of their visit, when Roddy's head is turned by Mary Gerrard's stunning good looks and he becomes hopelessly infatuated with her, Elinor breaks off their engagement. When Mary Gerrard is murdered by the administration of a fatal dose of morphine in a sandwich and, shortly afterward, Aunt Laura dies intestate leaving Elinor as the sole heir of the entire estate by virtue of being the only surviving blood relative, Elinor quickly finds herself in the dock for Mary's murder. As the only suspect with both the means and the motive to dispose of Mary Gerrard, her conviction is all but certain.But Sad Cypress is a complex mystery with many motivational twists and turns. Roddy Welman's head wasn't the only head turned with new found love. Peter Lord, the Welman's family physician, has fallen behind over tea kettle into love with Elinor Carlisle. When she is arrested, although even he is uncertain as to her guilt, he retains Hercule Poirot and charges him with finding the evidence to acquit her at any cost.Sad Cypress, a subtle, complex purely character driven mystery told virtually entirely through the device of dialogue, has an interesting three part structure. In the first part, told from Elinor Carlisle's perspective, we see the background of the entire story up to Mary Gerrard's murder. In the second part, we are witness to Poirot's subtle probing and investigation of the murder and, in the final third section, we sit in court as witness to Elinor's trial and prosecution for the murder. In a marvelous twist on the cozy mystery's usual climactic drawing room confrontation with all of the suspects, Poirot's findings are revealed to the reader by Elinor's defense lawyer during the proceedings of her trial.While Sad Cypress is a marvelously entertaining mystery, I'm unwilling to accord it a full five star rating because I believe it violates what I always felt to be an unwritten set of rules governing the genre. The mystery in Sad Cypress is simply not solvable by an astute reader no matter how carefully one might read the story. Ultimately, the mystery is solved and revealed by virtue of information to which only Poirot is privy. The superb surprise ending is no less entertaining as a result but one does feel a little cheated.On a historical note, I was interested to discover that this was Agatha Christie's first use of the courtroom setting in a Poirot mystery.Highly recommended.Paul Weiss

Although I'd read this Poirot novel as a kid of perhaps 11 or 12, I didn't have any specific memories of it, except for the English setting, and the fact that the title comes from an epigraph from Shakespeare (I'm not well read enough in his work to identify the source of the quote, though), which alludes to cypress wood as material for a coffin. (It reads in part, "Come away, come away, death/ And in sad cypress let me be laid....") So when I reread it for a common read this month in one of my groups, it was essentially like a new read; I was meeting the characters with no prior memories of them, and trying to guess the solution to the various mysteries posed as much as someone new to the book would have. It proved to be a rewarding read, and reminded me anew (as other Christie books have earlier this year as well) why I liked her work even back in my childhood --though I'm sure I have a heightened appreciation of it with the benefit of adult perception and experience.Set in 1939, and structured somewhat atypically for a Christie novel (at least compared to others I've read; which isn't all of them by a long shot!), this one begins with a short Prologue, opening the murder trial of one Elinor Carlisle, accused of the murder by poisoning of another young woman, Mary Gerrard. (Mary was 21 when she died; Elinor's age is never specifically given, but I'd suppose her to be in her early 20s.) We glimpse some of the tale's characters, mainly seen through Elinor's eyes, but she's psychologically in a bit of a daze. Her reflection that this all began with a "horrible anonymous letter" then segues us into the body of the book, with a third person recounting of all the events surrounding the death of Elinor's much-loved, elderly (and quite wealthy) aunt Laura, the widowed mistress of the country estate Hunterbury, who when Chapter 1 opens has been sidelined with a stroke, and leading up to the poisoning a few weeks later. (Mary was the daughter of Laura's lodge-keeper, and a great favorite of the old lady.) After a couple of sentences mentioning his presence in the court, Poirot doesn't enter the narrative at all until the beginning of Chapter 8, after Elinor's arrest. We then follow his investigations (though, of course, we don't read his mind! :-) ); and most of the last few chapters, leading up to the denouement, follow the course of the trial. (This part is very much an exercise in courtroom drama, such as Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason novels typically delivered, but fairly unusual for Christie.)Although the police and Crown prosecutor think the case against Elinor is so damning as to be practically open-and-shut, readers who grasp the conventions of the mystery genre in general, and of Christie mysteries in particular, aren't apt to seriously think she's guilty --because if she is, what on earth worthwhile is there going to be for Poirot to do? After all, Christie didn't bring him on stage to confirm an already obvious solution to a crime; she entertained her fans by allowing him to deduce a hidden solution that's NOT at all obvious, and of course to invite us to exercise our little grey cells to probe the mysteries with him. I actually guessed the identity of the poisoner even before the crime occurred --but my reconstruction of the crime and the motive was very much off the mark in several respects, and then I abandoned that theory to focus all my suspicions on another character who proved to be innocent. The denouement caught me totally by surprise; but, as usual in Christie mysteries, after the reveal, I could see that all the clues were in place and the logic made perfect sense.This is not, however, a mystery that focuses strictly on the intellectual solution to a puzzle; as in Christie's work generally, it's a story about people: well-drawn, nuanced characters (not least of them Poirot himself) in all of their relationships, with all of their feelings, hopes, secrets, and messy imperfections. One of my Goodreads friends who's reviewed this book found Elinor "unsympathetic." I didn't; I found her human, but a classy lady in spite of her human foibles, and never had any trouble rooting for her. The author, as usual, brings a lot of understanding of human nature to her tale, and a warm sympathy with her characters --at least, with the ones who deserve sympathy. That includes Mary, who (unlike some Christie murder victims) is a genuinely decent person and arouses our compassion as she goes through the opening chapters oblivious to the fact that she's doomed; our hopeless desire to save her adds to the emotional intensity here. All in all, I found this to be one of the best Poirot novels that I've read, and highly recommend it to genre fans.

Young Elinor Carlisle is accused of murdering Mary Gerrard, Hercule Poirot is called to prove her innocence. But with such damming evidence, can he succeed?I really liked the structure of this novel, told in three parts with the set up, Poirot investigating and back to the court room.Even though Poirot doesn’t feature that heavily, I like he’s inclusion to the story.

"The human face is, after all, nothing more nor less than a mask." "And underneath?" "Underneath is the primitive man or woman."Elinor Carlisle stands accused of murder. The evidence is mounted against her. The motive, the weapon, the time and place; everything points directly at the facts. And the facts state that Elinor is the one who poisoned poor Mary Gerrard. The only thing that stands between her and ruin is Hercule Poirot.This one...might just be my favorite Agatha Christie book thus far! The story started out really strong and just seemed to grow more and more intense throughout the book, especially during the trial scene near the end. I had in my mind who I thought the killer was and I was completely wrong...as usual! :P But in any case, this was a very engaging story with a fascinating plot! Loved it!　

This is one of those mysteries with an extremely tight plot. The human drama - the eternal love triangle - around the tragedy is gripping; there are a very limited number of suspects; and the accused seems to be indubitably guilty (in fact, the story starts with her trial). However, Poirot steps in with a last minute sleight of hand which leaves us all gasping for breath - with a perfectly plausible solution.Here, Dame Agatha's extensive knowledge of poisons - a skill she picked up during the war years - stands her in very good stead.