Agatha Christie's masterpiece: Five Little Pigs
Solving the long-ago murder of a philandering artist shows Hercule Poirot at his absolute best (NB this post does not reveal the ending)
Hercule Poirot’s great boast - or one of them; he is not by nature a reticent and modest man - is that he is not like other detectives.
“I do not need to bend and measure the footprints and pick up the cigarette ends and examine the bent blades of grass. It is enough for me to sit back in my chair and think.”1
He has not written a learned monograph distinguishing between 140 types of tobacco ash, in the manner of Sherlock Holmes2. Nor does he rely on the ingenious forensic detection of Austin Freeman’s Dr Thorndyke, or the painstaking attention to mundane police work that characterises Freeman Crofts’ Inspector French. Fingerprints and footprints are not unknown in Christie’s novels, but they rarely have the importance that they assume in other writers.
Of course Poirot is not purely sedentary. Now and again he dashes off to Somerset House to check records of births, marriages and deaths. He even examines crime scenes himself sometimes, and does take advantage of conventional physical clues: a scrap of balloon, a letter with a corner torn off, a broken coffee cup. He is quite happy to take on board information or clues discovered by the “official police" in their unglamorous routine. But more often than not such clues act as a kind of warning to Poirot, an indication that someone is trying to pull the wool over his eyes. For example, in Murder On The Orient Express (1934), there are endless physical clues, all pointing in different directions and almost all ultimately misleading.
Generally speaking, across the Poirot stories, Dame Agatha’s plotting makes good her portrayal of the Belgian with the egg-shaped head as a man who prefers to solve crime through psychological insight, in the broad sense of the word. He notices people and their attributes; how they speak, how they behave, what they tell lies about. The solution in The Hollow (1946), a splendid simple-clever mystery, and one of the classic Poirot titles, is discovered through close observation of the personalities of the Angkatell family, and their relations with each other. The detection in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938), a rare Christie locked-room puzzle and one of my favourites, hinges on an offhand comment by the butler about the house guests, which sets Poirot thinking along the right lines. In Cards On The Table (1936), he establishes the truth based on little more than interviews with the suspects and a careful reading of bridge scorecards.
In Five Little Pigs, published in 1942, we see the apotheosis of this approach.
The set-up is straightforward. Poirot is approached by Carla Lemarchant, the daughter of Amyas and Caroline Crale. Sixteen years previously, when Carla was only five, Caroline was convicted of murdering Amyas, a distinguished but hard-living and womanising painter, at their home, a spacious riverside house called Alderbury. She died in prison shortly afterwards. The near-universally accepted explanation is that Caroline killed her husband because she had discovered that he was going to leave her for the young and beautiful Elsa Greer, whose portrait he had been painting. She put up only a half-hearted defence and yet, paradoxically, was firmly insistent in a letter to Carla that she did not do it. Carla, who was only five at the time, wants Poirot to establish the truth once and for all. She is quite convinced that her mother was innocent, and appeals to Poirot’s professional vanity to persuade him to get involved:
“I’ve heard about you. The things you’ve done. The way you have done them. It’s psychology that interests you, isn’t it? The tangible things are gone…But you can go over all the facts of the case, and perhaps talk to the people who were there – they’re all alive still – and then – and then, as you said just now, you can lie back in your chair and think. And you’ll know what really happened.”3
And this is exactly what Poirot does. He speaks to the police officer who investigated the crime, and to Caroline Crale’s solicitors and the barrister who represented her at trial. He even speaks to the prosecuting counsel. Then he obtains five separate accounts of the murder and its context from the people, apart from Carla and her parents, who were present at Alderbury on the day of the murder. These are Meredith and Philip Blake, old friends of Amyas and Caroline; Elsa Greer, now Lady Dittisham; Angela Warren, Caroline’s half-sister; and Cecilia Williams, governess to Angela. Then, in one of the great denouements, he presents his account of what really happened, and despite the lack of direct evidence that would convince a jury, we see at once that his theory of the crime must be right, that no other explanation is feasible. It is an unanswerable vindication of Poirot’s method.
Five Little Pigs was the first of all Christie’s “murder in the past” mysteries to be published, although the Miss Marple novel Sleeping Murder, in which a young couple investigate a crime that one of them witnessed as a child, seems to have been written in 1940-41, roughly contemporaneous with Five Little Pigs (it was finally published, posthumously, in 1976). It is also by far the best. In the later part of Christie’s career, as her books became more preoccupied with rapid social change and the decay of the old English certainties, she returned several times to the idea of a historic murder. Ordeal By Innocence (1959), By The Pricking Of My Thumbs (1968), Nemesis (1971) and Elephants Can Remember (1972) each involve years-old mysteries. However, these titles are firmly in the second or third rank of her work and none of them come close to matching Five Little Pigs’ sheer tightness of plotting and beautifully organic solution. By an “organic solution” I mean one that arises naturally, coherently and believably from the prior events of the novel and from the personalities and dynamics that the author has established. I will not spoil the ending of Five Little Pigs, but I think it’s hard to reach the conclusion and disagree that close attention to character and motivation could have enabled us to resolve the problem just as Poirot has.
It is not - or not primarily - a matter, as in some detective novels, of constant checking back, cross-referencing statements to see who was in the study when the will was dropped and who could have been crossing the lawn at half past three and also had access to the keys to the cabinet where the antique duelling pistols were kept. Instead, the questions that are the key to the novel are “What are these people like?” “How do they relate to one another?” “What is their history together?” “What drives their interactions?” All the other clues are only intelligible in this context. It should be said that there are some absolutely superb subtle clues on show - I think I can say without giving too much away that the reader should beware, as so often in Christie, of overheard conversations.
One way to understand the notion of an organic solution is to consider the many mysteries that fail to deliver a truly satisfactory ending, because aspects of the story or the climax feel forced. Readers may not always understand quite why they are dissatisfied. Perhaps it is because the actions of characters in a novel are dictated by the requirements of the plot, rather than by the inner logic of their personalities and incentives. Additionally, Golden Age authors sometimes seem to have been reluctant to make a central or sympathetic character a killer, or wanted to spring a surprise ending on us without doing the necessary spadework, and so we end up with a crime being pinned on someone who has been peripheral to the story, or a crime carried out in a way that stretches credulity.
Just off the top of my head, I can think of two separate books that are set up as “family murders”, with a circle of suspects consisting mostly of relatives of the victim, and with the majority of the narrative devoted to investigations of the family, but in which the killer turns out to have been a chauffeur who has played very little part in the story, and whose unmasking hinges on facts that have not been revealed to the reader4. A mystery I read some years ago asks us to believe that a man could shoot his victim with a handgun, inside a house at the top of a cliff, while standing in a rowing boat at sea (to compound the offence the murderer has barely appeared until close to the end, and the whole background to his motive is bolted on rather than being part of the story we’ve read)5. In another a police inspector seems to take an implausibly long time to cotton on to a fairly simple deception, merely to pad out the novel6; in Five Little Pigs, by contrast, the police’s failure to understand the real nature of the crime seems entirely comprehensible and believable, even after Poirot has told us the truth.
One final point about Five Little Pigs is that it constitutes a strong argument against the view that Christie “couldn’t do character”. Critics of Christie often suggest that her novels are populated by stereotypes and archetypes, mere cardboard automatons who go through the motions for plot purposes but have no vigour or interest of their own. But her best novels do actually explore the breadth and depth of human nature and behaviour in quite striking ways. Consider Evil Under The Sun (1941): Christie cleverly uses the audience's prejudices about the (apparent) man-eating home-wrecker Arlena Marshall to mislead us, and subverts the stereotype in a way that is dramatically satisfying. Or take Ordeal By Innocence, in some respects not a detective story at all but a psychological study that takes a murder as its starting point. She explores the difficulties of living with suspicion, the temptation to accept a convenient and plausible untruth rather than confront a difficult truth7, and the tensions and moral ambiguities of adoption. Appointment With Death (1938) portrays with considerable subtlety the social-emotional dynamics that might lead abused children to stay with their monstrous abusive mother.
Given how Poirot reaches his solution, i.e. by the gathering of recollections and the analysis of human interactions, Five Little Pigs absolutely would not work as a novel unless you accepted the characters and their relationships, and found them realistic and rounded. I think any reasonable reader would do so. Amyas Crale is not a very good man. He is lecherous, selfish and sensual, but he is not a monster and he springs to life on the page as an engaging figure. The same goes for Caroline, who emerges not as a mere saintly long-suffering wife but as a flawed, credible, thinking individual who has a clear-eyed understanding of, and love for, her husband despite his flaws. Her relationships with her childhood friends Meredith and Philip, and with her half-sister Angela, feel similarly genuine and integrate seamlessly with the overall plot of the novel.
Occasionally people ask me where to start with Christie, or with classic murder fiction as a whole. My answer to this question varies, depending on the person or which books I’ve revisited recently, but I do sometimes recommend Five Little Pigs. On reflection maybe this isn’t a good idea; once you’ve read this gem, you’re already at the pinnacle of the Dame’s output.
Five Little Pigs, ch. 1
Holmes mentions this work in The Boscombe Valley Mystery (1891). Conan Doyle was a pioneer of the classic detective story, and so cannot be blamed for the fact that the use of distinctive cigarette or cigar ash as a clue to identity swiftly became a cliché of the genre. As early as 1928 it was specifically criticised in SS Van Dine’s famous piece for The American Magazine, 20 Rules For Writing Detective Stories, along with - inter alia - forged fingerprints, the use of dummies to establish alibis, and imitations of Conan Doyle’s “curious incident of the dog in the night time” (The Adventure Of Silver Blaze, 1892). I cannot remember Christie ever resorting to it.
Five Little Pigs, ch. 1
Ngaio Marsh’s Surfeit Of Lampreys (1941) and Mavis Doriel Hay’s The Santa Claus Murder (1936).
John Bude’s The Cornish Coast Murder (1935).
Bude’s The Sussex Downs Murder (1936).
This theme is also picked up in Closed Clasket (2016), the second (and best) of Sophie Hannah’s Poirot continuations.
Congratulations on the rare feat of writing an essay on a crime novel without spoiling the whodunnit! This happens to be one of the few Grade A Poirot books I haven't read - for the curious but simple reason that, when an impressionable child scanning my Gran's bookshelves, something about the title in conjunction with the subject matter aroused in me a sense of revulsion which I knew even then was stronger than the book could warrant. But almost thou persuadest me... It's years since I read Christie; perhaps a long-delayed encounter with Five Little Pigs could prove an ideal reintroduction!