Essay On By The Pricking Of My Thumbs Essay, Research Paper

English Literature

Book Review

Mystery Book of the Century with 1000 characters

By the Pricking of My Thumbs by Agatha Christie is a wonderful story with kidnappings, a series of murders, a painting with a story to tell, and two sly detectives. The book is set in 1940-1960 England. The plot winds, twists, and turns throughout the book. Numerous characters, almost too many, are introduced every few pages and there is just too much information to take in. Agatha Christie tricks you into thinking that you know what is going on when you really don t have a clue.

This book starts out by introducing the two main characters who are old detectives named Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. Their Aunt passes away at a ladies home recently. The Aunt owns a picture of a house that is near a canal that comes very important later in the book. Tommy goes off to a secret convention for old detectives and Tuppence takes off to find the house that is painted in the book.

Tuppence comes to a town that is called Sutton Chancellor where she finds the house and a numerous amount of interesting characters. She meets two gossipy old ladies, a child s missing grave, and a caretaker of a church. She finds out a lot of information about the house and is planning on returning home the next day but, she finds the child s missing grave and is about to uncover a secret she is knocked out and falls hard onto the concrete tombstone.

Meanwhile Tommy has returned back from his conference and is waiting for Tuppence to return home like she had informed their butler Albert. Tuppence does not return that night or the next day or the next. Tommy gets a call from at the ladies home who reveals a mysterious string of poisonous and unexplained deaths there. He also visits the painter who painted the picture of the house s wife since he has passed away already. He returns home to find that Tuppence has not returned. There is s phone call from his daughter who tells him that there was an article in the local newspaper about a lady in the hospital and Tommy dialed the hospital up to find out that it sure was Tuppence. Albert suggests to Tommy that there may be a clue in the desk that they received from their passed away Aunt and sure enough there is.

Even though the book has a great plot there seems to be too many characters to keep up with. I had to keep turning back to before pages to see if this character had already been introduced before. It seemed to get really confusing.

By the Pricking of My Thumbs is a wonderful mystery book if you have time to really read into and take a lot of time thinking and remembering all the characters. If you aren t the type of reader who has a hard time remembering exact names of people and places then this book probably isn t for you. Agatha Christie marvels million with her mind-tangling mysteries and By the Pricking of My Thumbs is no exception.