Review— By The Pricking of My Thumbs, Agatha Christie

[moon_custafer]

troisoiseaux ‘s post on Agatha Christie prompted me to find and read By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968) as it’s one I’d heard of but never read. It stars a now “elderly” Tommy and Tuppence. By 1968 they’d be around seventy, but from their activities over the course of the book I pictured them as fairly fit sixty-somethings; the book may not be set in the year of its publication, and in any case a slight vagueness of chronology fits with the theme— I’ll get back to that in a moment.

In the first few chapters, they visit Tommy’s aged, grouchy Aunt Ada in the well-run private Old Ladies’ Home where she’s lived for the past few years. Ada invariably insults Tuppence on these visits, insinuating the latter is a scarlet woman that her nephew insists on parading as his wife. Tuppence regards this with amused tolerance, telling Tommy it’s probably the most fun Aunt Ada gets to have these days and that anyway at her age she’s rather flattered by the imprecations; but she offers to wait in one of the downstairs sitting-rooms, where she encounters the white-haired old lady with a glass of milk.

This figure shows up in at least two other Christies, a sort of recurring nightmare: her other appearances are anecdotal, illustrations of what the characters find genuinely creepy compared with more conventional ghost-stories. Here she has a name— Mrs. Lancaster, and is finally part of a plot. She goes through the paces described in the earlier works: sipping her milk, chatting amiably with Tuppence— until she suddenly lowers her voice discreetly and asks Tuppence if she’s the mother of the child who’s buried behind the fireplace. Tuppence is startled, creeped out, and intrigued enough to return to the nursing home with Tommy in the wake of Aunt Ada’s death a few weeks later, hoping to talk with Mrs. Lancaster again and find out some more details of her delusion. Mrs. Lancaster, however, has been moved out, over her own protests and with suspicious suddenness, by a relative she’d never mentioned in their previous encounter. Meanwhile, the late Aunt Ada’s possessions include a painting that hadn’t been there on the previous visit, a gift from Mrs. Lancaster depicting a house that Tuppence could swear she’s seen sometime in the past few years, from the window of a train.

There’s the set-up, and I won’t spoil the rest of the plot except to confirm that Tuppence goes looking for the house and gets more than she bargained for in a way that never quite tips into the supernatural but instead builds a sense of time and memory as forces to be reckoned with.

Tuppence early on comments that time seems to move at different speeds in some places. When she starts her search for the house in the painting, she has to conduct a kind of archeological dig on her diaries and her own memory to narrow down what railway line she might have seen it from, and when she finds the house and tries to determine if a Mrs. Lancaster ever lived in the area, the locals can’t says as they’ve ever heard of her, but proceed to recount a bewildering array of local legend and history, dating back unknown decades, in which sinister child deaths and beautiful but unstable women keep recurring in combinations that echo but never quite line up with the hints dropped by that old lady in the nursing home. Meanwhile Tommy’s line of investigation takes him into an apparently quite different mystery involving Prof. Moriarty-style masterminds and organized crime. 

This is the kind of mystery in which half-way through, one of the characters points out that there are too many clues, and they’re going to have to figure out which ones are relevant and which are red herrings. In the end most of everything does tie together, but before that Tuppence has to realize that the oral history of country villages tends to be accurate but achronological: rather than going by dates everything’s classed in relation to some previous or subsequent event, and then the teller has to veer off and tell you about that event before they can get back to the main line, and the trouble is, she thinks, that that’s also how senile memory tends to work. The story circles and loops in ways that apparently frustrated critics in 1968 who wanted a classic tightly-plotted Christie, but I think this works well as an atmospheric horror novel.

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

It's been ages since I read this one, although I remember liking it. I should give it a re-read from a horror perspective, because that's a really interesting interpretation that didn't occur to me!

This figure shows up in at least two other Christies

I know one of these is The Pale Horse, but what's the other one?

[moon_custafer]

Sleeping Murder, though I forget who brings her up.

[sovay]

Sleeping Murder, though I forget who brings her up.

She's in Nemesis, too.