By the Pricking of My Thumbs by Agatha Christie — Reread Review

While I enjoy all the Agatha Christie stories, I have a definite soft spot for what I privately think of as ‘the creepy ones’. And By the Pricking of My Thumbs (something wicked this way comes) is gloriously full of creeping thrills. Agatha Christie contrasts a sinister atmosphere against the anything-but-creepy antics of Tuppence and Thomas Beresford.

Someday, maybe I’ll come across it by accident!
And so – she had forgotten all about it – until a picture hanging on a wall had reawakened a veiled memory.
And now, thanks to one word uttered unwittingly by Albert, the quest was ended.

By the Pricking of My Thumbs, Agatha Christie

For the star of a mystery novel, Tuppence isn’t a very good detective. But somehow, she’s all the more endearing for that. The way she thinks, meandering from recollection to connection to frustration, is excellently depicted. She remembers things in just the way real people do, in bits and pieces and with plenty of extraneous information to sift through.

On this reread, I particularly noticed how Thomas approached exactly the same set of clues in a completely different way. And it’s not a spoiler to say that he and Tuppence both got somewhere with their lines of enquiry, which meet up again towards the end of the book.

What I’d done was murder, wasn’t it, and you could only atone for murder with other murders, because the other murders wouldn’t be really murders, they would be sacrifices.

By the Pricking of My Thumbs, Agatha Christie

I can’t go into the creepiest thing about By the Pricking of My Thumbs without giving away the ending, so I won’t mention it here. Instead, I’ll recommend that if you enjoyed this, you might like Murder is Easy or Halloween Party.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.