By the Pricking of My Thumbs by Agatha Christie * * *
This is a later Tommy and Tuppence novel, with the couple now considerably older. The story begins when they visit Tommy’s elderly Aunt Ada at the nursing home where she lives. While there, Tuppence meets another resident, Mrs Lancaster, who asks her a very strange question about whether she has lost a child. It is one of those wonderfully unsettling little moments that immediately suggests something much darker is hiding underneath the perfectly ordinary surroundings. Not long afterwards, Aunt Ada dies, and Tommy and Tuppence discover that Mrs Lancaster had given her a painting before apparently being removed from the home. The painting depicts a house beside a canal, with a boat on the water, and Tuppence becomes convinced that she has seen the house somewhere before.
That painting becomes the centre of the mystery, although in a much more convoluted way than I expected. Tuppence remembers seeing the house from a train and becomes determined to find it, especially because she also wants to discover what happened to Mrs Lancaster. Eventually, she manages to locate the house and begins investigating the surrounding village. The house itself is wonderfully strange. Part of it appears to be occupied while another section is abandoned, and inside that unused part Tuppence discovers a creepy old doll. She also begins hearing stories suggesting that there may have been criminal activity connected to the area. At one point, while searching through the local cemetery, she is attacked and temporarily loses her memory.
Meanwhile, Tommy is conducting his own investigation and actually manages to uncover more concrete information. He traces the artist responsible for the painting and learns that the man has died, but he is able to speak to the artist’s widow. She reveals something particularly intriguing. The boat on the canal was not originally part of the painting. Someone added it later.
There are a lot of elements like this throughout the novel that sound fascinating individually. A mysterious elderly woman asking about a missing child. A painting of a strangely familiar house. A boat that should not be there. An isolated section of an old house containing a creepy doll. Stories about crimes committed years earlier. An attack in a cemetery. On paper, all of this sounds as though it should build into something wonderfully eerie, and there is definitely an unsettling atmosphere running through parts of the book. The problem is that these pieces never came together for me in a particularly satisfying way.
Instead, the mystery felt overly convoluted and strangely disjointed. There are a lot of clues, side investigations, suspicious details and apparent revelations, but some of the things that seemed as though they should be important ultimately were not nearly as significant as I expected. By the end, I had the feeling that the story had spent a long time pointing me towards something very different from where it actually ended up. That made the eventual explanation feel less like a satisfying revelation and more like, “Oh. So that was what was going on.”
I also found myself zoning out occasionally, which is unusual enough to be worth mentioning. There are parts of the investigation that I barely remembered afterwards, and I think that says something about the pacing and construction of the mystery. Christie can make the smallest detail feel significant when she is at her best. Here, there were so many details competing for attention that I sometimes struggled to tell which ones actually mattered.
Tommy and Tuppence themselves were still enjoyable, though. One thing I have always liked about them is that they operate differently from many of Christie’s other recurring characters. They are not a brilliant detective accompanied by an admiring sidekick. They are partners. In this book they spend a considerable amount of time investigating separately, with Tuppence physically following the mystery to the house while Tommy works through contacts and information, but they still feel like a unit. Their established relationship gives the story a warmth that the mystery itself sometimes lacks, and I enjoyed seeing them at a later stage of their lives.
At the same time, I did not feel that this book gave me the kind of character exploration that some of Christie’s strongest novels do. One of the things I particularly appreciate about her writing is that underneath the murder mysteries and detective plots, she can be remarkably interested in people. Her best books are often not just about discovering who committed a crime. They examine why people behave the way they do, what resentment or fear or desire can do to someone, and what may be hiding underneath an apparently respectable surface. I did not get much of that here. By the Pricking of My Thumbs felt much more like Christie had an idea for a strange mystery and built the novel around it, without giving the characters or themes the same depth I have found elsewhere in her work.
I also think that is why the ending disappointed me. The story creates such an eerie collection of images and possibilities that I expected the resolution to have more weight. Instead, when everything was finally explained, I was mostly left thinking that the journey had been more interesting than the destination.
This is not a bad Agatha Christie novel. It is a perfectly fine little mystery, and I still enjoyed Tommy and Tuppence enough to give it three stars. But compared with both Christie’s best work and the other Tommy and Tuppence stories I have read, this felt noticeably weaker. I remember enjoying N or M? much more, and I know Christie is capable of mysteries with far stronger character work and much more satisfying resolutions.
Interestingly, By the Pricking of My Thumbs was also adapted as part of the Marple television series, despite Miss Marple not appearing in the original novel. I watched that adaptation quite a while ago, so I may revisit it now that the book is fresh in my mind. Considering how much the adaptation apparently changes, including inserting Miss Marple into a Tommy and Tuppence story, it could make for an interesting comparison.
Overall, By the Pricking of My Thumbs had all the pieces of a mystery I should have loved. An unsettling nursing home encounter, a missing woman, a mysterious painting, an old house, a creepy doll, buried secrets and the suggestion that something terrible happened long ago. Unfortunately, those pieces promised me a more compelling mystery than the one I ultimately got.
Sometimes the road through a Christie mystery twists because she is leading you somewhere brilliant. This time, I think it simply took the long way around.
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