By the Pricking of My Thumbs by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie’s By the Pricking of My Thumbs is one of the strangest Christie’s novels I have read for a long time, perhaps ever.

It is a Tommy and Tuppence novel, not two of my favourites of her characters, but I will admit that I liked the more mature Tommy and Tuppence in this novel. When Tommy’s great Aunt Ada passes away Tuppence becomes involved the disappearance of an apparently nice old lady. Tuppence doesn’t give much credit to her assertions of a murdered child inside the fireplace, but the more Tuppence investigates the disappearance, the closer she comes to the truth of the child behind the fireplace and the bigger the danger she places herself in.


By the Pricking of My Thumbs didn’t seem to receive good reviews when it was published. I imagine it is because this book feels a lot less like her plot driven mysteries where Piorot and Marple try to figure out the clues, and a lot more like a modern-day crime novel or thriller. There are not the clues throughout the book to figure out the resolution to the mystery, but the book is still as tense as Christie’s other books, and perhaps even a little more melodramatic than usual.

Although it wasn't her usual style of story, I enjoyed it a lot and kept reading it until the very end.

6 / 8 

Really enjoyable and well written. I would recommend it.

I would love to know what you thought of this Christie mystery of you have read it. What did you think of an older Tommy and Tuppence, and did you think that this quite different to her usual stories/?

Originally posted 18 April 2011 Page Turners