An old woman in a nursing home speaks of a child buried behind the fireplace…
When Tommy and Tuppence visited an elderly aunt in her gothic nursing home, they thought nothing of her mistrust of the doctors; after all, Ada was a very difficult old lady.
But when Mrs Lockett mentioned a poisoned mushroom stew and Mrs Lancaster talked about ‘something behind the fireplace’, Tommy and Tuppence found themselves caught up in an unexpected adventure involving possible black magic…/

I read my first Tommy and Tuppence thriller. ‘The Secret Adversary‘ in 2020. Published in 1922, it was Christie’s second novel. I was pleased to find it was a thriller with a young couple who put an advert in the paper saying:

“Two young adventurers for hire. Willing to do anything, go anywhere. Pay must be good. No unreasonable offer refused.“

And found themselves hired by the British Secret Service to commit acts of derring-do to bring down the bad guys. 

I’ve watched Tommy and Tuppence grow up, get married and have children as Christie revisited them. The short stories in ‘Partners In Crime’ (1929) showed me Tommy and Tuppence, six years into their married life, working seamlessly as a team.  ‘N or M‘ (1940) showed me the couple working against suspected Nazi fifth columnists in wartime England while their grown-up children served in the armed forces.

I wasn’t sure what to expect of ‘By The Pricking Of My Thumbs’ (1968), my fourth visit with Tommy and Tuppence. In this book, they’re forty-six years older than when I first met them and living in a different world, which they can feel changing around them. Still, it was immediately apparent that Tuppence’s need to find out what’s going on and stop bad guys from triumphing was undiminished. Only the scale of the mystery had changed.

‘By The Pricking Of My Thumbs‘ was a gentle book, as memorable for the comments on what it means to grow old as for the mystery itself. The mystery starts at an old people’s home and is partly fueled by the fact that no one believes all the things that old ladies say. They attribute claims of having recognised a criminal or of hearing a child crying in a chimney as delusions and fancies. Except, Tuppence, a decade or two younger than what she thinks of as the ‘inmates’ of the old people’s home, is already starting to resent how women over a certain age are neither fully seen nor heard by the young. She sees how the old people are treated as if they were children whose perceptions are not to be relied upon and whose wishes don’t always need to be taken into account. 

I liked Tuppence’s reflections on what life is like for the old, how they are left with so little going on in the present, at the same time that they are losing their memories of the past. These reflections aren’t just empathy; they’re Tuppence thinking about where her own life is headed. I think the moment that this really hit home for her was at the funeral of Tommy’s Aunt Ada. She said, 

“Funerals are so sad aren’t they… I mean, funerals like Aunt Ada’s that are sad. I mean elderly people and not many flowers.” 

It seemed to me that the sad things wasn’t that the old person had died, but that they’d lived so long that there was almost no one left to mourn them.

Of course, it’s not just the old who are disregarded. A constant theme of the Tommy and Tuppence books has been how the male Establishment underestimates and marginalises women. It was true in 1922 and 1940, and it still seems still to be true in 1968. One of the things I enjoyed about the book was that, despite most of the men in the book being dismissive of or threatening towards women, it was the women who drove all of the significant events in the plot. 

I think Christie may, with ‘By The Pricking Of My Thumbs‘ have launched a new sub-genre in 1968: the Cosy Thriller. All the thriller elements were ther: disappearances, shady dealings, abductions, closely held secrets, but with no more sense of threat than a ‘Murder She Wrote‘ episode. I enjoyed it because Tommy and Tuppence, especially Tuppence, were engaging. I wanted them to win through.