Five Little Pigs: Agatha Christie’s Poirot Cold Case of the Painter Amyas Crale and Five Witnesses
A brilliant, celebrated painter, Amyas Crale, married to Caroline and father of a little girl, seems to have a full life. He is overjoyed to have found a new muse for his latest picture: painting is his great obsession, and until a work is finished he forgets everything around him. His wife knows this side of him and puts up with it as best she can.
Author: Agatha Christie (1890–1976)
Title: Five Little Pigs (1942)
Format: English paperback (HarperCollins), 288 pages
Scope: Hercule Poirot novel
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0007527519 (ASIN 0007527519)
A Clear Verdict
Full of renewed enthusiasm, Amyas starts painting while his guests spend the day at the house. When he dies of poisoning the verdict is clear: his wife, who had handled the bottle of coniine, is the only suspect. Many theories support the verdict, above all a fit of jealousy towards the young woman her husband was painting. Suicide is ruled out from the start, because Amyas was neither a pessimist nor a defeatist; his cheerful, lively personality made it unthinkable.
Sixteen Years Later
Sixteen years on, the couple’s daughter, who knows only part of the story, asks Hercule Poirot to prove her mother’s innocence: before she died, Caroline left her a letter swearing she had not killed anyone. So much time has passed that Poirot’s task is harder than ever. At the scene there are no cigarette ends, no footprints. He has to question the five witnesses who were at the house that day and try to reconstruct what happened, asking each one for a written account, and, as one would expect, each has a different version of events.
Five Witnesses, Five Accounts
Carla Lemarchant, Caroline’s daughter, is about to marry and cannot do so with the shadow of her mother’s conviction hanging over her. Poirot’s method is unique in Christie’s work: he tracks down the five people who were at the house on the day of the murder, the "five little pigs" of the nursery rhyme, interviews each of them and asks each to write a detailed account of what happened. The reader sees the same events five times, from five different angles, and the truth gradually emerges from the differences.
Murder in Retrospect
In the United States the book was published as Murder in Retrospect, which describes it exactly. Without a crime scene, physical clues or forensic evidence, Poirot has nothing to work with but memory and character, and Christie shows how much a detective can learn from what people remember, what they forget and how they explain their own behaviour. It is psychology turned into detection, and many critics regard it as one of her finest novels.
A Portrait of a Marriage
Beyond the puzzle, the book is a subtle study of a marriage between a selfish, brilliant artist and a woman who loves him despite everything. The memories of the five witnesses build a complex picture of Amyas and Caroline, and the final revelation is not only surprising but deeply moving. It was adapted for Agatha Christie’s Poirot in 2003, in one of the most admired episodes of the series.
Where to Go Next
Readers who love this kind of retrospective puzzle should try Elephants Can Remember, another case in which Poirot investigates a death from many years before.
Reopening Old Wounds
Reopening the case and old wounds seems strange, since the trial left little doubt about Caroline’s guilt. But Poirot sets out to investigate from the beginning and build his own version. Many unanswered questions, strong evidence against the accused, and the only person who wants to prove Caroline innocent is her own daughter. A striking case that never stops surprising, and for many readers Christie’s finest.
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