By the Pricking of My Thumbs is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie. It was first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in November 1968 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year. The UK edition retailed at twenty-one shillings (21/-)

Maurice Richardson in The Observer of 17 November 1968 said, "Not her best though it has patches of her cosy euphoria and aura of the sinister."

Robert Barnard said that this novel "Begins rather well, with a vicious old aunt of Tommy's in a genteel old people's home, but declines rapidly into a welter of half-realised plots and a plethora of those conversations, all too familiar in late Christie, which meander on through irrelevancies, repetitions and inconsequentialities to end nowhere (as if she had sat at the feet of Samuel Beckett).” He concluded his negative assessment of the plot by saying that it “Makes one appreciate the economy of dialogue – all point, or at least possible point, in early Christie."

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

In 2005, the novel was adapted by the French director Pascal Thomas under the title Mon petit doigt m'a dit...

The novel was adapted into a television film in 2006 as part of the Agatha Christie's Marple series starring Geraldine McEwan even though Miss Marple did not appear in the original story. Tommy and Tuppence were played by Anthony Andrews and Greta Scacchi.

Publication history

  • 1968, Collins Crime Club (London), November 1968, Hardcover, 256 pp
  • 1968, Dodd Mead and Company (New York), 1968, Hardcover, 275 pp
  • 1969, Pocket Books (New York), Paperback, 208 pp
  • 1971, Fontana Books (Imprint of HarperCollins), Paperback, 191 pp
  • 1987, Ulverscroft Large-print Edition, Hardcover,
  • 2000, Signet (New York), Paperback,

References

  • By the Pricking of My Thumbs at the official Agatha Christie website