FIVE LITTLE PIGS

Wee, wee, wee, I had the right murderer, but then I changed my mind; I shouldn't have. Mais voyons, I made a faux pas that Hercule never would have made. Now I'm talking gobbledegook! Once again, Agatha Christie entertains the reader with the great Belgian detective who lives in England and loves to speak French. This time Hercule Poirot  relies on a little epistolary to solve this sixteen year old crime. I say faugh to the murderer in this 1943 novel. I cheated, the word faugh was used in this novel by Agatha and is a interjection meaning "expressed contempt".

Our favorite detective is asked by a convicted murderess's daughter to investigate whether her mother killed her father. Apparently before Carla Lemarchant's (nee Crale) mother died in prison, she wrote Carla (then five years old) a letter stating that she was innocent of the murder of her husband and Carla's father, the artist Amyas Crale. Carla, brought up by a Canadian family for the ensuing sixteen years, gets the letter when she turns 21 years old. Her fiancee is upset that he is possibly marrying the daughter of a murderess. Carla wants to find out the truth in order to allay their fears. Poirot decides to take the case under the pretense that he is writing and/or editing a book about famous past murders. Did Caroline Crale really poison her artist husband sixteen years earlier? The jury believed she did and sentenced her to life in prison. She died shortly after the conviction.

There are five suspects (little pigs) that our 5' 4" sleuth zeroes in on. They include Amyas Crale's best friend Philip Blake and his brother Meredith Blake, Crale's lover Elsa Greer, the governess Cecillia Williams, and Caroline's disfigured sister Angela Warren. He interviews each suspect and then asks them to put their recollections in the form of a letter to him so he can clear up any ambiguities before the book is published. Needless to say, Hercule summons the five suspects together at Meredith Blake's house and to their surprise, he solves the murder case.

I think what makes Agatha's novels intriguing is the way Hercule Poirot solves murders. He really doesn't rely on clues, but instead he arrives at a decision by pure reasoning and only then does he draw a logical conclusion. In his own words he states "My success, let me tell you, has been founded on the psychology- the eternal why? of human behaviour." He is the forerunner of later detectives, such as The Thin Man and Columbo . Once again, as with all that Agatha Christie's writes, I highly recommend this enjoyable novel.

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

Comment: This novel was originally published as Murder in Retrospect . Agatha's second husband was famous archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan. She accompanied him on many of his digs that served as future settings for Hercule Poirot novels. In 1971 she received one of Britain's highest honors by being named Dame of the British Empire.