Morphine (novel)
Morphine (original title Sad Cypress ) is the 27th detective novel by Agatha Christie . He appeared in the United Kingdom at the Collins Crime Club in March 1940 and later that year in the United States with Dodd, Mead and Company. The German first edition was published in 1943 by Scherz Verlag (Bern) in the translation by Auguste Flesch von Bringen, which is still used today.
It determines Hercule Poirot in the 18th novel with him as the main character in a judicial drama.
Explanation of the title of the novel
The English title Sad Cypress comes from the second act, fourth scene from William Shakespeare's What you want :
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 true
Did share it.
The cypress is traditionally considered a weeping plant and is also used to plant cemeteries . The song, which is the motto of the novel , is about a person who has either poisoned himself or was poisoned: " My Shroud of White, stuck all with yew " ("My shroud, pierced by yew thorns)" - the fruits of the yew tree contain a deadly poison.
action
The novel is roughly divided into three parts (or acts). The first part tells the events of the first trial that lead to the murders, the second describes the investigation of Hercule Poirot and the third describes the last trial from the point of view of Elinor Carlisle and the outcome of the story.
Elinor Carlisle and Roderick Welman are engaged to each other and want to get married soon. They receive an anonymous letter in which someone informs them that their ill heir, Laura Welman, whose fortune could enable one of them to lead a carefree life in the future, will be "exempted" by someone. Carlisle suspects that he is talking about Mary Gerrard, who is known as the porter's daughter, because the aunt is very fond of her. You go to see said aunt.
Laura Welman has been dependent on help and tied to the bed for some time after her first stroke . After a second stroke, she asks Elinor to call the family lawyer in order to be able to draw up a new will , which should also include an inheritance for Mary Gerrard. Roddy has now fallen in love with Mary and arouses jealousy in Elinor. The following night, Mrs. Welman dies, and it turns out she never made a will. So Elinor inherits all of her fortune, since she is apparently the only blood relative.
Elinor breaks off his engagement with Roddy and offers him (which he refuses) and Mary (who accepts it) part of the inheritance. Elinor, Mary, and Ward Nurse Hopkins are sitting together for tea when Mary suddenly collapses after enjoying a sandwich with fish paste and appears to die of poisoning. Elinor comes under suspicion and is arrested and brought to justice. Her aunt's body is exhumed and it is discovered that both women were poisoned with morphine . The poison probably came from a pill tube that was stolen from the nurse's pocket.
In the second part, Poirot examines the case. He was asked to do so by the doctor Peter Lord. He is in love with Elinor and wants to prove her innocence.
The third part describes the trial. A shred of a torn label is the subject of the negotiation. Poirot can prove, however, that it is not morphine but apomorphine , an emetic . The sister had poisoned the tea she and the murder victim drank from and immediately afterwards applied the emetic to vomit. The first trace of Poirot, however, is Hopkins' claim that she stung a climbing rose. As Poirot notes, it is a Zephyrine Drouhin that is thornless. Hopkins had tried to explain the puncture caused by the apomorphine injection.
Your motive: Mary Gerrard was not the daughter of Elise and Bob Gerrard, but the illegitimate daughter of Mrs. Welman and Sir Lewis Rycroft. That made her, and not Elinor Carlisle, the closest relative of Mrs. Welman. Sister Hopkins had asked Mary to make a will. Mary had appointed her closest relative, her aunt Mary Riley in New Zealand , as an heir. With the help of two witnesses, Poirot succeeds in proving that the parish sister is precisely this aunt.
The novel ends with Poirot's harsh criticism of Peter Lord's own investigation - and with good prospects for a love story between Elinor Carlisle and Peter Lord.
people
- Hercule Poirot, the famous Belgian detective
The victims:
- Mrs. Laura Welman, a widow
- Mary Gerrard, her protégé and her illegitimate daughter
The suspects:
- Elinor Carlisle, Mrs. Welman's niece
- Roderick ( Roddy ) Welman, Mrs. Welman's nephew by marriage
- Dr. Peter Lord, Mrs. Welman's doctor
- Sister Jessie Hopkins, the ward nurse
- Nurse Eileen O'Brien, Mrs. Welman's nurse
- Mr. Seddon, Mrs. Welman's lawyer
- Mrs. Bishop, Mrs. Welman's housekeeper
- Horlick, the gardener
- Bob Gerrard, the caretaker and Mary's supposed father
- Ted Bigland, a farmer's son
Persons in court:
- The judge
- Sir Edwin Bulmer, Defense Counsel
- Sir Samuel Attenbury, Prosecutor
- Dr. Alan Garcia, counsel for the prosecution
- Inspector Brill, the investigating police officer
- Mr. Abbott, the owner of the grocery store
- Alfred James Wargrave, a rose grower
- James Arthur Littledale, a chemist
- Amelia Mary Sedley, a New Zealand witness
- Edward John Marshall, a New Zealand Witness
References to other works
Peter Lord says that he terminated the contact with Poirot on a recommendation from Dr. John Stillingfleet made. He describes a case that is very similar to the short story The Dream . This short story had been printed in Strand Magazine number 566 two years earlier . In the USA, too, it had appeared in the collection of short stories The Regatta Mystery as early as 1939 . The German translation of the short story was only published in 1964 in the anthology The accident and other cases . Dr. John Stillingfleet later appears again in the novel The Forgetful Murderess .
The novel is one of those works by the author whose titles are related to William Shakespeare. Others are Die Mausefalle (reference to Hamlet ), Taken by the Flood (reference to Julius Caesar ) (German title: Der Todeswirbel ) and By the Pricking of My Thumb (reference to Macbeth ) (German title: Lauter Reizende alten Damen ).
Judgmental dramas like this are rare in Agatha Christie's work. Another very famous because of the filming with Marlene Dietrich is a witness for the prosecution .
References to biography
When it comes to poisoning, Agatha Christie draws particularly extensively from her experience as a nurse in a pharmacy in a hospital during the First World War .
Film adaptations
Agatha Christie's Poirot
The novel was filmed full-length by London Weekend Television and aired on December 26, 2003 as a special episode on the television series Agatha Christie's Poirot . David Suchet plays the main role as Hercule Poirot.
Important English and German language editions
- 1940 Collins Crime Club (London)
- 1940 Dodd Mead and Company (New York)
- 1943 German first edition in the translation by Auguste Flesch von Bringen by Scherz Verlag (Bern)
The novel was first published in ten sequels in the USA in Collier's Weekly Magazine from November 25, 1939 (Volume 104, Number 22) to January 27, 1940 (Volume 105, Number 4) with illustrations by Mario Cooper .
- 2018 new translation by Giovanni and Ditte Bandini. Atlantik Verlag, Hamburg
Audio books
This novel is one of the few novels by Agatha Christie for which no German audio book has been published.
Web links
- Sad Cypress on the Agatha Christie Official Website
Individual evidence
- ↑ Chris Peers, Ralph Spurrier and Jamie Sturgeon. Collins Crime Club - A checklist of First Editions . Dragonby Press (Second Edition) March 1999 (Page 15)
- ^ John Cooper, BA Pyke: Detective Fiction - the collector's guide . Second edition. Scholar Press. 1994, ISBN 0-85967-991-8 , pp. 82, 86
- ↑ American Tribute to Agatha Christie
- ↑ a b DNB 572604610 German first edition in the catalog of the German National Library
- ^ The accident and other cases in the catalog of the German National Library