CLAIRE LADDS

Author of character-driven psychological literary fiction and other darker books, all with an emotional pull

Read Christie 2026

Sad Cypress (Read Christie Challenge, April 2026): Beloved Book in my Collection

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Image shows Sad Cypress book cover facing outwards on a bookcase filled with Agatha Christie books. Text on the image reads: Agatha Christie Challenge 2026, April. My choice for beloved in my collection, Sad Cypress.

I am still reading my way joyously through the list of books I have chosen for the Read Christie challenge this year. During April, participants were tasked with choosing a book which is beloved in their Agatha Christie collection. Now, there are many that I really like, and some that I absolutely adore. There are also one or two of Christie’s novels which have captivated a part of me and won’t let me go. So, actually, this became a really tricky choice, as I had to decide where to place other books, and in which months, for the challenge. Ultimately, my choice came down to the two novels which captured my heart from the moment I first read them: Sad Cypress or Endless Night. I will certainly be discussing Endless Night later in the year for a different month’s premise. Today, it is Sad Cypress that I have chosen as ‘beloved in my collection’.

I remember more vividly than most of my reading exploits the day that I began reading this novel for the first time. I was a teenager of about fourteen, and one with a huge capacity for imagination. I read this book in our back garden but before long, if you had asked me where I was, I would have described a very different place. So absorbed was I in the world of Sad Cypress that I was reading in the gardens of the ancestral home inside its pages, a rose trellis close to me with the breeze cascading the aroma of red roses all around my head, as I sat at a little table which held a plate of fish paste sandwiches, and indoors, when I went to continue reading out of the sun and sat on the imaginary giant wooden spiral staircase, a black medical bag magically opened, revealing a tube of Morphia. Only something about it did not seem quite right…

Now, I feel, this bizarre description might need putting into some sort of sensible context. Here is a brief summary of the book, in case you have never come across it before (there are no spoilers regarding ‘who did it’, but there are details which appear further into the book, so please skip this part if you want to read it with no preconceptions of the plot):

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Elinor Carlisle, heir to to her aunt’s fortune, stands in the dock, accused of murdering Mary Gerrard. An anonymous letter suggests that Elinor and her fiancé, Roddy, (also a relation to old Mrs Welman by marriage) need to watch out for Mary, who is becoming all together too close to Mrs Welman and may make trouble where inheritance is concerned. But, once Elinor and Roddy head to their aunt to see what all the fuss is about, things get much worse. Roddy’s visceral and sudden love for Mary Gerrard causes the engagement to be broken off. Worse still, their aunt dies. Meanwhile, Mary, now with a small provision made to her by the very honourable Elinor, has made a will – so now it seems she has something to leave to its recipient. Elinor, too, has made a will, leaving everything she inherits to Roddy.

While clearing out the house before its sale and also that of the associated lodge where Mary’s father lived, Elinor makes fish paste sandwiches, and invites Mary and nurse Hopkins who has taken a shine to Mary and is helping out, to have lunch with her. An hour later, Elinor and nurse Hopkins find Mary dead.

Did Elinor poison Mary Gerrard by adding Morphine to the sandwiches? The police are so convinced by this theory, and the evidence which backs it up, that she is in the dock for murder. Or could someone malign be framing Elinor to suit their own ends? Doctor Lorde, who attended to old Mrs Welman, is determined to get Elinor off at all costs, and enlists the help of his friend, Hercule Poirot to do so. Poirot, being Poirot, intends to seek out the truth, even if that might mean he discovers that Elinor is actually guilty of murdering Mary Gerrard – and of other atrocities along the way. But sometimes there are things even Poirot does not want to know…

~

So, why exactly is it so beloved in my collection? The answer is threefold: Christie’s use of structure, her treatment of character, and the thematic undercurrent that pervades every aspect of this book.

Firstly, structure. The story itself is cyclical and I truly love a cyclical story. We begin in the courtroom, where Elinor Carlisle is being accused of the murder of Mary Gerrard. And, to be honest, as readers, we do not know if she did or not. So Christie takes us back to the beginning of the whole event: to the point when Elinor and her fiancé, Roddy, receive an anonymous letter warning them that someone may be trying to get their hands on the inheritance. We follow the whole process to the murder, and then to Elinor’s arrest. And so begins a separate section – the investigation by Poirot, with everything a reader can expect, from the questioning of suspects through to Poirot’s own quirky ways of finally bringing his findings to a conclusion, which he always states will be the truth, regardless of what that is. We are pulled this way and that over who might be guilty throughout the entire middle section of the novel. Finally, we return to the courtroom, where the excitement mounts and justice is delivered – and we, the readers, finally discover whether Elinor is guilty or innocent.

I will look at character and the thematic undercurrent together, as they are intricately linked. The people in this book have a great deal of hidden depth, which I absolutely love. Christie is excellent at hinting at what is below the surface through events that happen or have happened in the past, or through partially thought-out ideas of her protagonists. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the character of Elinor Carlisle. She can appear as someone rather lacking in passion on the surface, but when we spend time reading between the lines of everything Elinor does, says and in particular thinks, we find a woman who is extremely emotionally aware of herself and of the devastation that love, and betrayal, can cause a person. Her thoughts are powerful, passionate, sometimes dangerous and take her to the brink of murder (whether she goes through with it I will leave you to discover for yourself).

The hidden emotional depth appears to run in the family. One of the most powerful features of this novel, for me, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the murder mystery. I have always been fascinated by the painful undercurrent of the tragedy of love and, indeed, I think this has always appealed to me the most about this book. The emotions, particularly those which are buried from everyone but the reader, and those which have been hidden due to years of societal expectation, are strong and carry the motivations of certain characters throughout (I am being careful to avoid spoilers here). Mrs Welman has a past which she has been holding close to her heart for decades. When we discover what this is, I think it is impossible not to feel anguish for the old lady’s plight, and a distaste for the social, political and legal situations which prevent a deep and enduring love from being fulfilled. Poirot, however, with his astute and sympathetic understanding of the intricacies of the human heart at its most passionate, loving, vulnerable and, indeed, dangerous, shows himself to be so much more than the quirky little Belgian detective who uses order and method and collects facts alone. He shows himself to be human. For me, the ones in which Poirot is sunk into the grey areas of the guilty and the innocent are always the best Poirot stories because it adds a level of complexity to the vehicle for crime-solving. Poirot’s detection is impeccable here. While reading I am both rooting for him all the way, and also hoping against hope that he finds something which will acquit Elinor, as the evidence is stacked ridiculously high against her.

If you have never read Sad Cypress, if you love Agatha Christie books, or if you are trying them out for the first time, if you are a Hercule Poirot fan (as I am, as you will most certainly know if you have read other posts of mine or are in my Readers’ Club), or if you find intrigue in the complexities of love, passion and secrets which society prevents women from revealing while also being embroiled in solving a mystery and all of it flanked by the courtroom drama which plays out over the Accused (and yes, I am aware there was a lot there), then I heartily recommend this novel. You can then read it for yourself and see why it is my Read Christie choice for April.

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The ABC Murders (Read Christie Challenge, March 2026): Book that made the biggest impact on me as a young reader

Death on the Nile (Read Christie Challenge, February 2026): My choice for ‘beloved characters’

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Death on the Nile (Read Christie Challenge, February 2026): Book Containing Beloved Characters

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February’s task for the Read Christie 2026 challenge, as set by the Agatha Christie team, has been to read a book containing ‘beloved characters’. The team chose Mrs McGinty’s Dead, and it’s a great choice, featuring as it does both Hercule Poirot and Ariadne Oliver. As with January’s read, I have chosen to deviate from the suggested novel to reflect on my own choice for a book with characters beloved to me: Death on the Nile.

As with the Christie team’s choice, mine also contains Hercule Poirot, who happens to be my absolute favourite Christie detective, and possibly my favourite detective of all time. He was the first detective I encountered in adult crime novels, when my dad bought me a copy of The ABC Murders. I devoured it at the age of ten and became completely devoted to all of the Poirot stories. Without really realising it, I had also encountered Poirot much earlier, growing up as I did on Sunday afternoon cinematic films on the TV, several of which were the Peter Ustinov versions of Poirot, glamorous films, with Death on the Nile being one I saw multiple times, and also featuring the wonderful David Niven as Colonel Race. Moving on several decades, the David Suchet version of Death on the Nile is one of my favourite films in which he played Poirot. With all that in mind, I was always likely to be drawn to this novel like a moth to a flame. And it is the characters in the novel that I will discuss here.

Hercule Poirot

Out of all of Christie’s novels which involve recurring characters, it is Poirot who is my enduring love. I’m not even sure I can fully explain, even to myself, why he intrinsically appeals to me. What I do know is that I love his quirky dress and mannerisms, and the way he goes about picking at the carcass of a crime, piece by piece, until all the scraps of clues have been used up and explained. I also find it very endearing that he has such a humble backstory, one of being a child of a large family who had to make a success of himself to support them. A man who was injured during the First World War and was taken care of by a woman in England (and if you read The Mysterious Affair at Styles you will get a fuller flavour of this), and has a strong appreciation of poverty and desperation, and of skills of workers, which makes him an empathetic detective who treats a Duchess in the same way as he treats her maid (or, indeed, in Death on the Nile, the downtrodden, poor relation in the same way as the high-born, wealthy one).

Most of all, I love his approach to the human side of crime. He knows that, somewhere at the heart of the motive, is something intensely personal which reflects the way the victim lived their life and how it impacted the people around them. And he also shows himself to be, not just a problem-solving machine, but a human, too, considering the feelings of other people in the case, showing empathy, sympathy and, indeed, humanity. There are several cases he solves whereby he allows justice to take its course in an unconventional way. This is one of those cases, and highlights Poirot’s knowledge and acceptance that, sometimes, there are morally grey areas to consider, along with intertwined compassion for the perpetrator as well as the victim. This is, of course, Poirot’s subjective view, but it leaves the reader with plenty to consider: how would we have handled the final dishing out of justice?

The underrated sidekick

Now we turn to the sidekick. Ex-MI5 agent, Colonel Race is deployed by Christie in this role here. He appears part-way through, and is there to do some investigating of his own (the sub-plot of which I won’t spoil here). I always enjoy an appearance by Colonel Race; I find him a truly likeable man and a consummate professional, therefore a great extension of Poirot’s own impeccably performed investigations. It is interesting to watch these two professionals work through their findings. An appearance by Colonel Race always means that something much wider-reaching than a crime motivated by the private and personal is lurking in the background, which gives an extra edge of danger to the atmosphere, and therefore joining his investigations with Poirot’s reminds us that the world can be a dangerous place, both without and within our own lives. For me, Colonel Race is one of Christie’s underrated characters.

Impassioned suspect

I’ve alluded to the crimes I feel Christie is particularly expert at creating: those seeded in the intensely personal. These frequently interweave with the emotional, and are character-driven. And, as we know, getting inside the head of the people close to a crime is Poirot’s forte! There are few characters in any of Christie’s novels in which the emotional comes into play as much as in the initial prime suspect here, the impassioned Jacqueline de Bellefort. She is immediately suspected of the killing of Linnet Doyle, her former best friend who stole her ex-fiancée, Simon Doyle, and married him within weeks. After this devastation to her life, we next meet her as she follows the newly-weds to all the locations of their exotic honeymoon and confesses to Poirot that she has strong desire to shoot Linnet. Poirot both sympathises with her desperate emotions and is extremely fearful that such strength of feeling leaves Jacqueline herself in danger from her own passions.

Jacqueline frequently lingers in my mind when I think of Christie novels. Her emotional intensity has stayed with me from the very first time I read about her, decades ago. She is one of those stand-out characters who make me consider whether my actions would have matched hers, should I have been placed in her situation (which contains such huge spoilers that I cannot detail them here), and has gone a long way to inform me, as a writer, how someone could be driven almost entirely by the emotions burning within them. I believe that Death on the Nile is worth reading to follow Jacqueline’s story alone.

Other enduring characters to give us pause for thought

There are other truly enduring characters for me in this book. Once again, my choices revolve around the human qualities with which Christie has endowed them. I want to focus, in this section, then, on the mothers, and their younger female counterparts. Two mother stand out: the tormented Mrs Otterbourne, writer of romance which has been shunned by the libraries and increasingly her readership, and has turned to drink, and Mrs Allerton, possibly the most kind and caring mother that Christie ever wrote about in her fiction. The absolute pain of Mrs Otterbourne, which plays out in the tempestuous relationship she has with her long-suffering daughter, Rosalie, is placed into opposition with the almost idealised mothering of Mrs Allerton. She is an extremely endearing person, whom Poirot likes immensely, and who is ultimately able to provide comfort and love to Rosalie in a very humble, selfless manner. As a reader, I can’t help but feel desperately sorry for one, and admire the way the other is prepared to take on a ‘found family’ mother-daughter dynamic, based purely on her innate kindness of soul. Combined, they leave us with a lingering unease around the concept of motherhood, and the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship.

There are two other characters I would like to make mention of here, too: Rosalie Otterbourne, long-suffering daughter of the aforementioned Mrs Otterbourne, and Cornelia, poor and downtrodden relation of the high-born Mrs Van Schyler who has a secret. I have immense sympathy for Rosalie, dealing as she does with the difficulties of her mother’s professional and personal downfall, and struggling with her own entanglements of resentment of her mother and her undeniable love for her. Cornelia, by contrast, is blissfully unaware that she is being treated abominably by her rich relation and is grateful for the opportunities afforded her in being allowed to come on the excursion down the Nile. This unawareness and her accompanying obliging behaviour, led by the controlling Mrs Van Schyler, is what makes me have huge sympathy for Cornelia. However, what I love about both Rosalie and Cornelia is their strength of character, Rosalie’s which has had to be of a sustained nature to protect her mother, and Cornelia’s, ultimately, in choosing to follow her own path of love, unrelated to social position or money, both of which she could have and which would give her a ‘better’ life.

So then, for me, Death on the Nile contains very particular kinds of ‘beloved characters’: the repeat characters who are respectful and consummate professionals, and the women who fill this entire novel with everything it is to be human: the passion, suffering, resilience and, yes, love. In saying this, I am, of course, very aware of the discrepancy between gender roles and that males are given that of logical fact-finder and puzzle-solver whereas women are given the roles of the impassioned, the reactive, driven by a need of some kind. Yet, heading towards a hundred years after the book was written, this is what makes the women in particular stand out as sympathetic, real people, of their era and beyond, and I love that. There are other men in this novel whose actions provide the plot points for the story, such as the thief, or the fraudulent professional, yet continually it is the women who provide the heart of the story so that it is not merely a two-dimensional puzzle (and Christie’s books never are! If you don’t believe me, then I urge you to read Endless Night or And Then There Were None). This gender separation throughout may even be why the book ends with the promise of marriage between a man and woman who find a tempered middle ground between hard, factual logic and passionate interiority, thus drawing together facets of both. Could it even be Christie suggesting that extremes of either are unhelpful to us if we want to live a happy life? I’ll let you decide.

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The Sittaford Mystery (Read Christie 2026: Best Beginning)

The Sittaford Mystery (Read Christie Challenge, January 2026): Book with the Best Opening

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I am absolutely thrilled to be joining in with the Read Christie challenge for 2026. Agatha Christie has been my inspiration since I was ten years old, when my dad first gave me a copy of The ABC Murders. Little did he realise what kind of literary obsession he had started; Christie has been my constant source of reading, and remains my deep-rooted inspiration as a writer. So, how could I be even remotely reluctant to get involved with Read Christie for 2026?

So, let’s start with January’s prompt for reading. The Agatha Christie team chose ‘best opening’ for eager participants’ monthly enjoyment. What does, or could this mean? The best opening line? Best murder from the outset? Most creepy start? Something else entirely? Whichever way you interpret it, there are some great options here. Right at the top of my list would be Appointment with Death, for its first line (which I will not spoil here for you – please do go and read it! I love this book, and the TV Poirot adaptation). The Christie team chose to read The Body in the Library, a great choice in which a random female corpse is found in the library of the Bantrys, friends of Miss Marple, and sets up a marvellous plot for this book.

But, I confess, I had a more visceral reaction to the prompt and ‘best’, while left open to subjectiveness, for me became an indulgence. I’m an unashamed lover of the snow. I love everything about it – the way it looks as it falls, the stunning beauty of its undisturbed settlement on the ground and house roofs, the way you can track footprints through it, from a pigeon to the postman. And there is a Christie book which opens with, for me, an idyllic wintry landscape: The Sittaford Mystery.

The novel begins with the sparsely numbered residents of Sittaford, cut off from everywhere by the vast amount of snow which has recently fallen, being invited to Sittaford House by Mrs and Miss Willett who have blown in from abroad and rented the large house from Captain Trevelyan for the winter months. The Captain has, himself, rented a small house in Exhampton six miles’ walk away and is oblivious that, at 5.25p.m. that evening, in his house, what begins as a fun game of table turning (getting ghosts to spell words by knocking against the table while the participants link hands via thumbs and little fingers) turns into something much more deadly. At 5.25p.m., Captain Trevelyan’s own table raps out the letters to inform the guests at Sittaford House that he is dead. And that he has been murdered.

There has been a fall of several feet of snow in a village which is so insular and tiny that it only consists of the big house belonging to Captain Trevelyan and the six cottages he has had built. All told, you would barely run out of fingers if you counted the residents of Sittaford at the beginning of this novel. This snowfall in such a place doesn’t merely satisfy my aesthetic nuances, it excites me because it provides the perfect backdrop for a mystery. But why?

Firstly, it provides a wonderful atmosphere for a novel which focuses intensely on the way everywhere is isolated from the its neighbour. The unsullied snow stops being a thing of beauty and becomes a means of a kind of imprisonment for the residents, or creates complications and difficulties for movement. This then forces a ring around the people who ‘could not possibly have committed the murder’, as they were holed up together, while the snow ravished the countryside beyond. Imagine looking out of the window of a large old house into the darkness while the snow batters against the windows and believing that you have just been sent a message from beyond to inform you of the murder of the man who owns the house you are standing in. The atmosphere of a perfect wintry village changes exponentially, doesn’t it?

Indeed, the snow sets up the entire landscape of the book, both physically and structurally. It acts as an inhibitor, just as the witnesses and suspects sometimes do. The picturesque snow could also, potentially, give the game away for the culprit, should any footprints be discovered around the house in Exhampton where Captain Trevelyan’s body is discovered, and again, one look at the beautiful, snowy hillside from Sittaford village all the way downhill to Exhampton makes us wonder how anyone could have managed to get to the house to murder the Captain. Cars cannot pass, and trains are disrupted. Travelling into Exhampton from other areas has been somewhat possible, so other suspects can be ruled in as they are proven to have reason to want the Captain dead. Does this, therefore, mean categorically that no one at Sittaford could possibly have committed murder? Suddenly, everything starts to feel impossible, unsolvable as with every great mystery at some point in the story.

Perhaps most importantly of all, without the snow established to great effect at the very outset of The Sittaford Mystery, this book simply would not work. Everything relies on it. The depiction of the village is not merely picturesque and establishing a wintry atmosphere. It’s not only hinting that the snow can be dangerous and cause problems for people (both with and without the intention to murder). It is absolutely essential to the plot, the clues which Christie plants so expertly from the very beginning, and is among the most vital pieces of evidence in piecing together the means and opportunity of the guilty.

I hope you can see why, despite so many incredible choices for ‘best opening’ that I could have chosen to kick off Read Christie 2026, I have sunk straight into the snowy Sittaford. There is so much more to this deceptively picturesque beginning than meets the eye. And this is just one of the many things I absolutely adore about Agatha Christie’s books.

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Death on the Nile (Read Christie 2026: Beloved characters