Review: By the Pricking of My Thumbs

By the Pricking of My Thumbs by Agatha Christie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

By the time Christie wrote this, she'd been writing for fifty years, and I'm glad to say she wasn't stuck in the style of the 19-teens; she'd learned, grown, taken on extra dimensions of psychology without making it obvious or all about her research, and was writing a deeper, more satisfying story than the rather silly (though entertaining) one that begins the series. This gets complex, and dark, and suspenseful.

Tommy and Tuppence have aged in something at least approximating real time - their exact age isn't specified, but they're roughly in their sixties, it seems, which is consistent with being in their early 20s at their first appearance in 1922. Their two children are married, with children of their own. (There's no mention of Betty, who they spoke of adopting at the end of N or M?, so presumably that didn't happen for some reason.) Tuppence continues to belie her real name, Prudence (as her daughter remarks, nobody would associate that name with her), going off investigating something that's pinged her remarkably accurate spidey-sense without leaving any record of where she's going, and this leads to some anxious moments for Tommy and Albert. (Albert is back to being their servant, having presumably given up the pub he owned in the previous book.)

There are a lot of threads in the book. An elderly woman who was in the same rest home as Tommy's aunt, who has been removed from there apparently without trace. An entirely legitimate-seeming lawyer who pings Tommy's also accurate spidey-sense, after which he sees the lawyer being followed by a detective he knows. A painting of a house that Tuppence thinks she's seen before, given to Tommy's aunt by the now-missing elderly woman. Garbled stories from the local gossip about who used to live in the house. A criminal gang who hide their loot in various places. A series of child murders which took place years before. A cadaverous knight with a woeful countenance. An elderly vicar. A woman who runs everything in his parish.

Eventually, they come together. Some turn out to be not especially important, while others go in a direction I absolutely had not expected. And Tuppence ends up in danger more than once, to Tommy's enduring frustration.

One thing I sometimes don't like about these books is how often the couple split up and follow separate investigations, when they're so good as a pair. We get to see them working together a lot in the short story collection, Partners in Crime, but in the other three books I've read so far (with one to go), they're often apart. It does give an opportunity to contrast Tuppence's erratic and intuitive brilliance with Tommy's dogged and systematic focus, though, which might be more obscured if they were always in the same scenes.

I'm looking forward to Postern of Fate.

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