Entry tags:
By the Pricking of My Thumbs, by Agatha Christie
Tommy and Tuppence, a delightful middle-aged married couple, solved mysteries when they were young. Now they have nothing to do with that world except for Tommy's yearly conference on national security issues, where he meets with other aging former espionage agents.
When they go to visit Tommy's disagreeable elderly aunt in a nursing home, she promptly kicks Tuppence out for being a scarlet woman; Tuppence, amused, goes to the common room and sits by a sweet old lady drinking milk, who tells her it's not poisoned today and asks if it's her dead child who's walled up behind the fireplace.
The aunt dies soon after, and Tuppence inherits a painting of a house that she recognizes, though she's not sure why. She also finds that the sweet old lady, who gave the aunt the painting, has mysteriously vanished. While Tommy is at the conference, Tuppence sets out to solve a mystery that may not even be one, sifting for clues in her own memory, the memories of various people with memory loss and dementia, old crimes, urban legends, and garbled accounts of things that may or may not have happened. There's women who may be witches, dead birds and old dolls that fall down the chimney, a beautiful house with exactly one half of it falling into ruin, and far too many murdered children, some of whom may be imaginary.
Agatha Christie started writing about Tommy and Tuppence when they were young, and aged them in real time. Their books are pastiches of various genres, from specific Golden Age mystery writers to espionage.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sovay reviewed this book as folk horror, and I can't disagree.
There are elements of traditional mystery, an unexpected element of organized crime, and it does have a mystery with a solution. But it doesn't feel and isn't structured anything like a traditional mystery. It's instead a swirl of thematic elements and creeping dread; the reliability and unreliability of memory and intuition are major themes, and the plot reflects that. You don't know exactly what's going on, but you can feel that it's something bad.
( Read more... )
Christie scale: VERY LOW levels of ANYTHING OBJECTIONABLE.
When they go to visit Tommy's disagreeable elderly aunt in a nursing home, she promptly kicks Tuppence out for being a scarlet woman; Tuppence, amused, goes to the common room and sits by a sweet old lady drinking milk, who tells her it's not poisoned today and asks if it's her dead child who's walled up behind the fireplace.
The aunt dies soon after, and Tuppence inherits a painting of a house that she recognizes, though she's not sure why. She also finds that the sweet old lady, who gave the aunt the painting, has mysteriously vanished. While Tommy is at the conference, Tuppence sets out to solve a mystery that may not even be one, sifting for clues in her own memory, the memories of various people with memory loss and dementia, old crimes, urban legends, and garbled accounts of things that may or may not have happened. There's women who may be witches, dead birds and old dolls that fall down the chimney, a beautiful house with exactly one half of it falling into ruin, and far too many murdered children, some of whom may be imaginary.
Agatha Christie started writing about Tommy and Tuppence when they were young, and aged them in real time. Their books are pastiches of various genres, from specific Golden Age mystery writers to espionage.
sovay reviewed this book as folk horror, and I can't disagree.There are elements of traditional mystery, an unexpected element of organized crime, and it does have a mystery with a solution. But it doesn't feel and isn't structured anything like a traditional mystery. It's instead a swirl of thematic elements and creeping dread; the reliability and unreliability of memory and intuition are major themes, and the plot reflects that. You don't know exactly what's going on, but you can feel that it's something bad.
( Read more... )
Christie scale: VERY LOW levels of ANYTHING OBJECTIONABLE.
