‘Correct me if I am wrong, Mr Poirot, but I think you are interested in—character, shall we say?’
Poirot replied: ‘That, to me, is the principal interest of all my cases.’
Hercule Poirot had the gift of listening…
‘Murder is a drama. The desire for drama is very strong in the human race.’
‘You are at least right in this – not to take what has been written down as necessarily a true narrative. What has been written may have been written deliberately to mislead.’
‘I want to show you, mademoiselle, that even in a small unimportant matter, I am something of a magician. There are things I know without having to be told.’
Three points about ‘Five Little Pigs’:
- It’s another nursery rhyme story
- It’s a cold case
- It’s a closed circle mystery
1. Nursery rhyme
Quite obviously this is another of the detective stories Christie concocted from, or constructed in order to parallel, a nursery rhyme (compare ‘Pocket full of Rye’, ‘Crooked House’, ‘Five Little Pigs’, ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’, ‘One, Two, Buckle my Shoe’, ‘Three Blind Mice’). It has five main suspects who correlate exactly to the five pigs in the rhyme:
This little piggy went to market.
This little piggy stayed at home.
This little piggy had roast beef.
And this little piggy had none.
And this little piggy cried wee wee wee all the way home.
2. Cold case
Poirot is called in to solve a murder which took place sixteen years earlier. Back then beautiful Caroline Crase was convicted of poisoning her husband, the high-living artist Amyas Crale and sentenced to life imprisonment. In the end she served just a year before dying in prison.
The motive for the crime was that Amyas was openly having an affair with a beautiful 20-year old woman, Elsa Greer, and just the day before, Elsa had openly taunted Caroline, claiming Amyas was going to divorce her and how soon the family home would be hers (Elsa’s). Various witnesses overheard Caroline saying that would never happen, that she would kill her husband first; and then, later, she was heard having a stand-up row with Amyas, in which she said she would kill him rather than let him run off with another woman.
The means was a poison called coniine, extracted from the plant spotted hemlock. This coniine was the product of a neighbour of the Crales’s, a man named Meredith Blake who had spent years experimenting with herbs, plant extracts and home-brewed medicines. The day before the death, this Meredith, along with his brother Philip, had come over to the Crales’ house for tea, and had delivered quite a monologue about his hobby, and about this poison in particular.
Next day Meredith discovered that his bottle containing coniine (a volatile poisonous compound found in hemlock and other plants) was suddenly half empty. After the death, a bottle with traces of coniine in was found in Caroline’s room. Her story was that, after hearing about its deadly properties, she had stolen some from Meredith’s laboratory, with a view to killing herself if the divorce went ahead. But what clinched her conviction was that this poison was discovered in a bottle of beer she personally brought and served to her husband as he painted a portrait of Elsa in the garden, and which the doctors quickly established as the painter’s cause of death.
Sixteen years later, her daughter, Carla Lemarchant, who was 5 at the time, and was taken away and looked after by relatives in Canada, comes of age (21) whereupon the family solicitor gives her a letter written by her mother claiming that she (Caroline) was innocent, and didn’t murder her father.
Whereupon Carla tracks down Hercule Poirot, meets and hires him to find the identity of the real killer and so clear her mother’s name. As Poirot explains for the umpteenth time, this kind of case suits him because all the forensic clues have long since disappeared and so it is a question almost entirely of psychology, of meeting and questioning the suspects, finding out about their lives and motives, and slowly figuring out who had the character and personality to be the murderer.
Poirot said placidly:
‘One does not, you know, employ merely the muscles. 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. It is this’ – he tapped his egg-shaped head – ‘this that
functions!’
(Chapter 1)
And, less obviously, he always needs to know about the personality of the murderee.
‘Have you ever reflected, Mr Blake, that the reason for murder is nearly always to be found by a study of the person murdered?’
‘I hadn’t exactly – yes, I suppose I see what you mean.’
Poirot said:
‘Until you know exactly what sort of a person the victim was, you cannot begin to see the circumstances of a crime clearly.’
He added:
‘That is what I am seeking for – and what you and your brother have helped to give me – a reconstruction of the man Amyas Crale.’
More about psychology, below.
3. Closed circle
According to Google AI:
A ‘closed circle mystery’ is a subgenre of detective fiction where a crime, usually a murder, occurs within a limited group of suspects who are isolated from the outside world. The core concept is that the perpetrator must be one of the individuals present, and the detective’s task is to identify the killer from this select group.
Thus Poirot quickly finds out that on the day of Amyas Crale’s death, there were five people at the couple’s home (Alderbury) who he proceeds, whimsically, to nickname the five little pigs.
The five little pigs
- Philip Blake – the pig who went to market – the younger Blake brother, stockbroker, lives at St. George’s Hill, ‘a prosperous, shrewd, jovial looking man – slightly running to fat’ – ‘a well-fed pig who had gone to market – and fetched the full market price’
- Meredith Blake – the pig who stayed at home – the older Blake brother who inherited the estate , a basic huntin’, shootin’ fishin’ squire but who has amused himself with amateur dabbling in herbalism and chemistry – he ‘resembled superficially every other English country gentleman of straitened means and outdoor tastes. A shabby old coat of Harris tweed, a weather-beaten, pleasant, middle-aged face with somewhat faded blue eyes, a weak mouth, half hidden by a rather straggly moustache’
- Elsa Greer – the pig who ate roast beef, Amyas’s painting model and the woman he was planning to leave his wife for – ‘a superb, slim, straight creature, arrogant, her head turned, her eyes insolent with triumph’ – ‘They’ve fed her meat all right,’ he [Depleach] said. ‘She’s been a go-getter. She’s had three husbands since then. In and out of the divorce court as easy as you please. And every time she makes a change, it’s for the better. Lady Dittisham – that’s who she is now. Open any Tatler and you’re sure to find her.’
- Miss Cecilia Williams – the piggy who had none – Angela’s governess, a small, elderly lady in a neat shabby dress, living in very straitened circumstances in a one-room flat, but buoyed up by her Victorian sense of duty and feminist loathing of men
- Angela Warren – the piggy who went wee wee wee – Caroline’s younger half-sister who, as a child, she threw a paperweight at and blinded in one eye (!) – has turned out a very distinguished woman: ‘traveller to weird places. Lectures at the Royal Geographical Society’
Schematic
Christie’s early novels are chaotic harum-scarum adventures. In the later 1920s and 1930s they become more structured. Murder on the Orient Express is a classic example of her taste for clarity and logical structure, with a chapter each devoted to the testimony of all the witnesses. ‘Five Little Pigs’ as another of the same type, its contents laid out with the clarity and logic of an official report, feeling almost like an engineer or architect’s schematic design for a novel.
Thus in book one, Poirot goes to interview the key figures form the trial 16 years earlier, the counsel for the defence, for the prosecution, a young solicitor involved in the trial, and the Crase family solicitor. Then he goes to see each of the five key suspects, in the same order as the nursery rhyme. He not only interviews them (with the thin excuse that he is involved in a book which is being written about the murder) but asks each of them to write their own account of what happened and why. And it is the five written statements by the five little pigs which make up part two of the book.
And then in part three, Poirot uses everything he’s learned in order to, as usual, create a detailed reconstruction of the crime which, at various points seems to incriminate every one of the piggies, before, of course, revealing the actual murderer with a flourish!
Book One
- Counsel for the Defence
- Counsel for the Prosecution
- The Young Solicitor
- The Old Solicitor
- The Police Superintendent
- This Little Pig Went to Market [Philip Blake]
- This Little Pig Stayed at Home [Meredith Blake]
- This Little Pig Had Roast Beef [Elsa Greer]
- This Little Pig Had None [Cecilia Williams]
- This Little Pig Cried ‘Wee Wee Wee’ [Angela Warren]
Book Two
- Narrative of Philip Blake
- Narrative of Meredith Blake
- Narrative of Lady Dittisham
- Narrative of Cecilia Williams
- Narrative of Angela Warren
Book Three
- Conclusions
- Poirot Asks Five Questions
- Reconstruction
- Truth
- Aftermath
Christie makes it neat by attributing part of the schematic, diagrammatic layout of the text to Poirot’s own, well-known symmetry obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Thus towards the end, in part 3 chapter 2, we find Poirot telling himself he doesn’t really need to interview Miss Williams, but…
Really, when he came to think of it, he did not want to ask Angela Warren any questions at all. The only question he did want to ask her could wait… No, it was really only his insatiable passion for symmetry that was bringing him here. Five people – there should be five questions! It was neater so. It rounded off the thing better.
Cast
As well as the five little pigs, additional characters are:
- Hercule Poirot
- Carla Lemarchant – daughter of Caroline and Amyas Crale – named Caroline after her mother, her first and last names were changed when she was sent to Montral, Canada, to live with her aunt and uncle when her mother was sent to prison
- John Rattery – Carla’s fiancé, a ‘ tall, square-jawed young man with the steady grey eyes’
- Sir Montague Depleach – council for the defence i.e. defended Caroline Crase 16 years ago – ‘force, magnetism, an overbearing and slightly bullying personality. He got his effects by a rapid and dramatic change of manner. Handsome, urbane, charming one minute—then an almost magical transformation, lips back, snarling smile—out for your blood’
- Quentin Fogg, K.C. – ‘thin, pale, singularly lacking in what is called personality. His questions were quiet and unemotional —but steadily persistent. If Depleach was like a rapier, Fogg was like an auger. He bored steadily. He had never reached spectacular fame, but he was known as a first-class man on law. He usually won his cases’
- George Mayhew – junior solicitor in the firm representing Caroline
- Edmunds – managing clerk of Mayhew’s firm of solicitors
- Mr Caleb Jonathan – senior solicitor in the Crale family firm, retired to Essex
- Ex-Superintendent Hale – leading officer on the Crale murder investigation
Locations
The three main properties are on the south Devon coast.
- Handcross Manor – home of the Blake family, inherited home of Meredith Blake – just a short row across a creek from…
- Alderbury – home of Amyas and Caroline Crale
- Ferriby Grange – home of Lady Tressillian, where Angela is sent after Amyas’s death
- Montreal, Canada – home of Uncle Simon and Aunt Louise Lemarchant, where 5-year-old Carla was sent to live after her mother went to prison
The psychology book
‘What is the meaning of all this nonsense?’ demanded Miss Williams.
‘It is to show you that it is the eyes of the mind with which one really sees…’
When he sets off to interview the five little pigs, Poirot needs a cover story. Saying he’s actively investigating a 16-year-old crime would raise lots of questions. So he comes up with the more plausible notion that he has been commissioned to write a book about classic crimes. The sales angle is that he’ll give the crimes a modern, psychological interpretation.
‘It is proposed to rewrite the stories of certain bygone crimes – from the psychological angle. Psychology in crime, it is my speciality.’
As Poirot explains to Philip Blake, in the olden days the interest in crimes often focused on ‘romance’, about love triangles and so on. Nowadays, psychology is in the ascendant, and the reading public want to hear all about complexes and traumas etc. (This, by the way, is flatly disproved by Christie’s own works, which include very occasional references to actual psychology, to Freud, complexes and so on – but are still heavily reliant on love triangles, affairs, adultery, jealousy and so on.)
Obviously this handily chimes with Poirot’s own genuine interest in psychology and in the psychology of the five main suspects, so his cover story fits neatly with his actual interests.
‘My success, let me tell you, has been founded on the psychology – the eternal why? of human behaviour. That, Mr Blake, is what interests the world in crime today.’
Poirot uses his outsiderness
In previous novels we’ve seen Poirot consciously deploy his foreignness, his outsiderness, when it suits him, when it gives him a tactical advantage. In this novel he several times lays it on with a trowel, deliberately playing up his foreignness in order to play to his interviewees’ prejudices and lull them. For example when trying to inveigle himself with hale-fellow-well-met Philip Blake.
‘Of course you are. We all know that. The famous Hercule Poirot!’ But his tone held a subtly mocking note. Intrinsically, Philip Blake was too much of an Englishman to take the pretensions of a foreigner seriously.
So:
Hercule Poirot shrugged his shoulders. He was at his most foreign today. He was out to be despised but patronized.
Whereas with the other Blake brother, Meredith, the piggy who stayed at home and is a more traditional country squire:
Hercule Poirot prided himself on knowing how to handle an ‘old school tie’. It was no moment for trying to seem English. No, one must be a foreigner – frankly a foreigner – and be magnanimously forgiven for the fact. ‘Of course, these foreigners don’t quite know the ropes. Will shake hands at breakfast. Still, a decent fellow really…’
Poirot imagines Meredith Blake’s view of him:
Really a most impossible person – the wrong clothes – button boots! – an incredible moustache! Not his – Meredith Blake’s – kind of fellow at all. Didn’t look as though he’d ever hunted or shot – or even played a decent game. A foreigner.
But by playing up to this stereotype, Poirot lulls his interviewees into thinking he is stupid, they are clever, and so gets more information out of them.
Everyday sexism
The case, at least to start with, appears to be entirely about the eternal triangle, a married couple broken up by a young woman seducing the husband, and the murderous jealousy of the wronged wife. Which just triggers, in my mind, the tired conclusion: Humans, and their complete inability to manage their relationships! Why on earth are they called ‘adults’? How on earth do they think they can run a planet when they can’t even run their own relationships?
Anyway, the focus on sexual relationships means the novel lends itself to more than the usual quota of casual generalisations about the sexes, with the majority of them – rather inevitably – being unflattering comments about ‘women’.
Poirot said: ‘With women, love always comes first.’
‘Don’t I know it?’ said Superintendent Hale with feeling.
‘Men,’ continued Poirot, ‘and especially artists—are different.’
FOGG: ‘Very good looking, hard-boiled, modern. To the women in the court she [Elsa] stood for a type – type of the home-breaker. Homes weren’t safe when girls like that were wandering abroad. Girls damn full of sex and contemptuous of the rights of wives and mothers.’
Superintendent Hale said: ‘Oh, you know what women are! Have to get at each other’s throats.’
‘The girl [Elsa] was a good looker, all right,’ said Hale. ‘Lots of make-up and next to no clothes on. It isn’t decent the way these girls go about. And that was sixteen years ago, mind you. Nowadays one wouldn’t think anything of it. But then – well, it shocked me. Trousers and one of those canvas shirts, open at the neck – and not another thing, I should say!’
Philip Blake said: ‘I don’t know that there was much subtlety about it. It was a pretty obvious business. Crude female jealousy, that was all there was to it.’
‘Women will always see a private detective! Men will tell him to go to the devil.’ (Poirot)
‘There was Mrs Crale, there was Miss Williams, there was a housemaid. It is a woman’s job to pack—not a man’s.’ (Poirot)
And much more in the same vein, scores of casual generalisations about the character of all women, or all men, which have, maybe, become unacceptable in our time…
Countered by feminism
‘She was a great feminist and disliked men.’
(Angela Warren on Miss Williams)
The sweeping generalisations about ‘women’ made by pretty much all the men in the story are given a strong counter in the character of the impoverished old governess, Miss Williams, who is described more than once as a ‘feminist’.
For a brief moment you think Christie is fighting back against these sexist stereotypes. But then you realise that Miss Williams is herself a stereotype, a caricature of the dried-up old spinster, impoverished and bitterly anti-male. Poirot is interviewing her:
‘He was devoted to her as she was to him?’
‘They were a devoted couple. But he, of course, was a man.’
Miss Williams contrived to put into that last word a wholly Victorian significance.
‘Men—’ said Miss Williams, and stopped.
As a rich property owner says ‘Bolsheviks’ – as an earnest Communist says ‘Capitalists!’ – as a good housewife says ‘Blackbeetles’ – so did Miss Williams say ‘Men!’
From her spinster’s, governess’s life, there rose up a blast of fierce feminism. Nobody hearing her speak could doubt that to Miss Williams Men were the Enemy!
And Christie shows that feminists are just as capable of stereotyping and judging men as the chauvinist men are of stereotyping women.
‘Oh, I dare say you are a sentimentalist like most men—’
Poirot interrupted indignantly:
‘I am not a sentimentalist.’
It is of course a woman writing all this. And it’s worth making the point that all the ‘feminists’ in Christie’s novels are liable to be mocked. According to her biographer, Laura Thompson, Christie had no time for feminism. She associated it very much with anti-men i.e. misandrist attitudes (misandrist: ‘a person who dislikes, despises, or is strongly prejudiced against men’) and this is precisely the attitude she attributes to Miss Williams. Christie thought it was as absurd for feminists to be anti-men as it was for what she called woman haters (what we nowadays call misogynists) to be anti-women. For her, the two extremes were equally as ridiculous.
Christie and stereotypes
But more broadly, the flagrancy of Miss Williams’ character reminds you all over again that Christie’s novels are made out of stereotypes. Certain ones – the stereotyping of women and, occasionally, of ethnic minorities, in Christie’s works – are what leap out to us because, a hundred years later, they are (still) the hot button topics of our day, drilled as we are at work and in all public spaces with the mantras of diversity and inclusion.
But Christie deploys stereotypical ‘wisdom’ or tropes about pretty much every human type and category. This reliance on stereotypical characters expressing stereotypical views is what makes her novels genre fiction and nowhere near ‘literature’.
Thus characters all make sweeping generalisations not only about men, women and numerous sub-types of men and women, but about servants, butlers, the police, lawyers, the entire criminal justice system, about children and teenagers, and many more…
Artists are usually careless about money matters…
Even Poirot sums up all the suspects as ‘types’ – for a start, describing them as ‘little pigs’ isn’t that flattering, is it? He thinks of Meredith as a typical country squire, of Philip Blake as a typical affluent stockbroker, of Miss Williams as a typical spinster, and so on.
And, of course, Poirot is very fond of making sweeping generalisations about criminals, about ‘the criminal mind’, murderers, and so on.
From one perspective Christie’s texts amount to a kind of battle or conflict between rival generalisations: Superintendent Hale’s generalisations about women or murder being rebutted by Poirot’s countervailing generalisations, all the characters sharing their prejudices about artists and ‘the artistic temperament’. In a sense every single conversation can be seen as a conflict of generalisations.
He looked a bit ashamed of himself. Men do when women pin them down in a corner.
(Philip Blake describing Amyas)
Then he calmed down a little and said women had no sense of proportion.
(Philip on Amyas again)
‘I have to admit that she looked incredibly beautiful that afternoon. Women do when they’ve got what they want.’
(Philip Blake)
‘It made him appear at a disadvantage, and men do not like appearing at a disadvantage. It upsets their vanity.’
(Miss Williams)
A study of Christie’s novels makes you realise just how much human conversation is made up of dodgy generalisations, very often based on a person’s own anecdotal evidence, or ‘someone told me x or y’ – or just picked up from the culture at large.
And realise just how much a person’s character can, in a sense, be defined by the generalisations or mental axioms they operate with. Most people’s generalisations aren’t meant to be taken in a statistically significant, scientific or logical way. They are just ways of expressing character, or mood. In a sense a person’s character is the totality of the generalisations they harbour. When Elsa says the following to Amyas:
‘I think you’re right about Spain. That’s the first place we’ll go to. And you must take me to see a bullfight. It must be wonderful. Only I’d like the bull to kill the man—not the other way about. I understand how Roman women felt when they saw a man die. Men aren’t much, but animals are splendid.’
That final axiom has no meaning or value whatsoever as objective information about the world. It is entirely an expression of her character and attitude, which are young and selfish, thoughtlessly cynical, conventionally rebellious. Meredith Blake, who gives us this quote, draws the correct conclusion:
I suppose she was rather like an animal herself – young and primitive and with nothing yet of man’s sad experience and doubtful wisdom.
But this is because he is a puppet in his creator’s hands. The supposed quote from Elsa, along with its sweeping generalisation, is entirely meant to characterise her, and Meredith’s comment is just an elaboration of the same point: a repetition of it in a different mode.
But since Elsa never existed, in fact none of these people ever existed, these kinds of generalisations should be seen as simply one of the techniques by which Christie creates the distinctions between the characters she’s inventing. Empty of intrinsic value or meaning, they are just rhetorical strategies associated with the textual entities referred to as characters.
Summary
In all my summaries of Christie’s novels I’ve broken off before the final act and never revealed whodunnit. I won’t here, either – except to say that the big reveal and explanation of whodunnit in lots of them, by far the majority, is often ridiculously contrived and complicated and often unbelievable. ‘Five Little Pigs’ has a claim to be one of the best of her novels because the revelation, when it comes, is not only not too preposterously contrived, but psychologically believable and convincingly bleak.
Credit
‘Five Little Pigs’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in January 1943.
Related links
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- 1940s reviews
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