Five Little Pigs

Did You Know?

• The novel was first serialized in the US in Collier's Weekly in ten installments from 20 September to 22 November 1941 as Murder in Retrospect with illustrations by Mario Cooper.
• Author and critic Maurice Willson Disher's review in The Times Literary Supplement of 16 January 1943 concluded, 'The answer to the riddle is brilliant.'
• The UK first edition retailed at eight shillings while the US edition was priced at $2.00.

Plot summary

Sixteen years after Caroline Crale was convicted of poisoning her husband Amyas, her daughter Carla Lemarchant receives a letter in which Caroline claims innocence. Carla asks Hercule Poirot to reinvestigate. Poirot learns that on the day of the murder, five other people were present at the Crales' home: stockbroker Philip Blake, amateur chemist Meredith Blake, Caroline's half-sister Angela Warren, governess Cecilia Williams, and Amyas's painting model Elsa Greer.

Amyas died of coniine poisoning; Caroline had confessed to stealing coniine from Meredith's lab, saying she contemplated suicide. She later brought a cold bottle of beer to Amyas, and the police and jury assumed she poisoned it because Amyas was having an affair with Elsa. Poirot interviews the five suspects, noting none has an obvious motive; only Angela believes Caroline innocent. He assembles the five, along with Carla and her fiancé, at Meredith Blake's house and reveals the truth.

Caroline was innocent but chose not to defend herself because she believed Angela committed the murder. Angela had handled the beer bottle but added nothing. Caroline assumed Angela added something as a prank, accidentally causing death; Caroline felt guilty for blinding Angela in one eye as a child and sacrificed herself to atone. Poirot reveals the murderer was Elsa Greer.

She overheard Amyas reassure Caroline he would not divorce her, felt betrayed, and put the poison in a glass of warm beer she gave Amyas. When Caroline later brought cold beer, Amyas remarked everything tasted foul, showing he had already taken the coniine.

References and allusions

The nursery rhyme "This Little Piggy" gives the novel its title, as Hercule Poirot uses the rhyme to structure his thinking. Each of the five little pigs corresponds to a chapter named after one of the five suspects. Agatha Christie employed a similar approach in other books, including One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, Hickory Dickory Dock, A Pocket Full of Rye, and Crooked House. Poirot references the famous case of Hawley Harvey Crippen as an instance where a crime was reexamined to satisfy the public's growing interest in psychology.

The theme of Romeo and Juliet appears when characters recall the trial; solicitor Caleb Jonathan quotes Juliet's lines from the balcony scene and compares her to Elsa Greer, noting their shared passion, recklessness, and disregard for others. The poison used is coniine hydrobromide, derived from poison hemlock, the same substance that killed Socrates, and it has also been used to treat whooping cough and asthma. The poisons act mentioned is the Pharmacy and Poisons Act 1933.

The painting described as a blind girl sitting on an orange is by George Frederic Watts and is titled "Hope"; the description comes from Oswald Bastable, a character in E. Nesbit's The New Treasure Seekers. Other prints in the room include Dante and Beatrice and Botticelli's Primavera. Two of Amyas's paintings are held in the Tate. When Poirot approaches Meredith Blake, he introduces himself as a friend of Lady Mary Lytton-Gore, a character from Three Act Tragedy, and this case is later recalled in Elephants Can Remember.

The proverb "Take what you want and pay for it, says God" is cited by Elsa and appears in Hercule Poirot's Christmas, South Riding, and Windfall's Eye. The reference to interesting tombs in the Fayum points to the Fayum Basin and its famous mummy portraits.

Adaptations

In 1960, Agatha Christie turned the novel into a play called Go Back for Murder, which cut Poirot entirely. A young lawyer named Justin Fogg, whose father had defended Caroline Crale, takes over the detective role. Carla’s fiancé is an unpleasant American who objects to her digging into the old case, and she eventually leaves him for Fogg. The play had a preview in Edinburgh and then opened at London’s Duchess Theatre on 23 March 1960, but it ran for only thirty-seven performances.

It later appeared in the 1978 collection The Mousetrap and Other Plays. The 2003 television adaptation was the first episode of the ninth series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, with David Suchet as the detective. Several plot points were altered: Caroline is executed rather than sentenced to life and dying a year later; Philip’s hostility stems from a romantic crush on Amyas, not on Caroline; and Carla is renamed Lucy and has no fiancé. She does not worry about inherited criminal tendencies but simply wants to clear her mother’s name.

After Poirot reveals Elsa’s guilt, Lucy pulls a pistol on her, but Poirot talks her into letting the law handle it. The cast included Rachael Stirling, Julie Cox, Toby Stephens, Aidan Gillen, Sophie Winkleman, Talulah Riley, Aimee Mullins, Marc Warren, Patrick Malahide, and Gemma Jones. In 2011, the French series Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie aired an episode titled Cinq petits cochons. The setting moved to France, Poirot was absent, and the case was solved by private detective Émile Lampion and his former boss Chief Inspector Larosière.

Philip Blake was cut from the story, Caroline survives and is cleared, and the nursery rhyme appears only in the Carla character’s childhood memories of her father. A radio adaptation of Five Little Pigs aired on BBC Radio 4 in 1994, with John Moffatt playing Poirot.