By The Pricking of My Thumbs

☆☆

Reasons for the Poirot Score:

This is a Tommy and Tuppence adventure, without any pace or thrill. It is not a formal whodunit. There are a few clues that allows you to partially guess who the child murder might be, but not with any confidence. The solution is highly improbable. The plot is not well explained, and the sub-plots are not worked through. In a way this book demonstrates just how good Christie had been back in her prime, as the flaws in this book are so apparent.

This novel, written when Agatha Christie was 78, is best read – if read at all –  as a sharp and accurate meditation on old age in the 1960s. Most women of Christie’s age were in old people’s homes, not writing best selling thrillers about them. Christie was born in 1890, and her own father died from pneumonia when aged 55, before antibiotics were invented, when she was only 11 years old. In the UK, by the 1960s life expectancy for women was 74.2 years and for men 68.2 years. Christie reflects on the changes she has seen in her lifetime, and how British society has radically altered in the way it interacted with, and looked after its elderly population.

For review click here (plot spoilers ahead)

Trivia

Dedication:

This book is dedicated to the many readers in this and other countries who write to me asking:

 ‘What has happened to Tommy and Tuppence? What are they doing now?’

 My best wishes to you all, and I hope you will enjoy meeting Tommy and Tuppence again, years older, but with spirit unquenched!

This is Christie’s only book dedicated to her Tommy and Tuppence fan-base. This dedication chimes with the general one in the very first Tommy and Tuppence book, The Secret Adversary [1922]

‘To all those who lead monotonous lives in the hope that they may experience at second-hand the delights and dangers of adventure.’

Usually if there was a dedication in a Christie novel, it was to a specific family member, or friend.

Aunt Ada’s belongings

Tommy’s aunt Ada was 83 in 1968, so was born in 1885. Agatha Christie was born in 1890. When Ada died, Tuppence examined Ada’s personal belongings to decide what to keep and what to give away. Christie allows Tuppence to deal with this death in a very matter of fact, unemotional way. When Christie’s own mother died and she had to clear out the family home, Christie herself became very depressed. Perhaps writing this fictional scene was how Christie would have liked to have approached real life differently.

a good fur stole, a set of cameos and a Florentine bracelet and earings and a ring with different coloured stones in it

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Cameos are out of fashion now. I can remember my granny wearing a cameo broach in the 1950s. The ancient Romans engraved cameos, a portrait on a contrasting plain coloured background. The fashion for cameos came back in the Renaissance, and again in the Napoleonic Empire, and then in Victorian Britain (1837-1901).

Florentine bracelet and earings:

Victorians travelled to Florence on the Grand Tour. Tourists bought inlaid stone jewellery usually with a flower theme.

An acrostic ring.

Thinking of buying someone special a present? In Victorian times single young men’s access to young ladies was very limited, and usually the young female was chaperoned. Courting had to be whilst dancing at a Ball, or over tea. Secret signalling grew up to express suppressed feelings. A complex language of flowers developed; not only the type of flower but different meanings for colours of the petals. People in Europe have forgotten these codes, except red roses say ‘I love you’, but they are still used, for example, in Japan.

A very expensive and slightly more obvious way of expressing passion was for a young gentleman to buy a ring. The message was spelt out in precious stones: not good for the colour-blind! For example:

Diamond Emerald Amethyst Ruby Emerald Saphire Topaz  = DEAREST.

Aunt Ada’s ring spelt ‘regard’

Ruby Emerald Garnet Amethyst Ruby Diamond

These rings were apparently not engagement rings, but rings given by people as a token of intent. As aunt Ada never married, there is a poignancy to this ring, and a back-story of unrequited love that the reader pieces together. Later in the book Major-General Sir Josiah Penn described Ada Fanshawe to the surprised Tommy Beresford as

‘Prettiest girl I ever knew.’

John Hugh Boscawen

There was a real artist called Boscawen [1851-1937], who was known for his watercolours rather than oils, so perhaps Christie just liked the sound of this Cornish name, but spelt it Boscowan in the text .

Christie added details of some fictitious modern artists: Stitchwort, Fondella and Paul Jaggerowski in the text. Christie previously mentioned modern art in Third Girl, where Poirot visits a gallery. Cubism got mentioned in several of her 1920 adventure thrillers.

The Great Train Robbery:

In August 1963 a mail train was robbed of £2.6 million. Most of the money was never recovered. In By The Pricking of My Thumbs there is a discussion about a criminal mastermind and a criminal gang:

‘big planned organised robbery,..somewhere in the background, Mr Eccles’.‘There’s a lot of money stacked up abroad’.

Was Christie obliquely inspired by the Great Train Robbery when she wrote this book?

By the pricking of my thumbs

The title of this Christie is taken from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In Act IV scene 1 the three witches are on the heath. The second witch says:

‘By the pricking of my thumbs,

Something wicked this way comes.’ In the play it is Macbeth who comes to ask the witches about his future.

Christie has several Shakespearean titles: Taken at the Flood [Julius Caesar], Sad Cyprus [Twelfth Night], a Mary Westmacott Absent in the Spring [from a Sonnet] and her longest running play The Mousetrap [Hamlet].

Christie often writes about Lady Macbeth as a shorthand for a character in a book, for example in The Clocks.

In By the Pricking of my Thumbs there is an unusual discussion about Macbeth between Tommy Beresford and Aunt Ada’s GP, Dr Murray.

Dr Murray said ‘I have always wondered what Macbeth meant when he said of his wife ‘She should have died hereafter.’

Tommy then described a ‘particular production’ that Macbeth ‘was hinting to the medical attendant that Lady Macbeth would be better out of the way. Presumably the medical attendant took the hint. It was then that Macbeth, feeling safe after his wife’s death, feeling that she could no longer damage him by her indiscretions or her rapidly failing mind, expresses his genuine affection and grief for her.’

This vignette from the Scottish play may seem inconsequential padding, but might also reflect Sir Philip Starke’s conflicted feelings towards his wife.