By the Pricking of My Thumbs is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in November 1968[1] and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year.
While Tommy talks with his aunt, Tuppence has a conversation with another resident, Mrs Lancaster, who unexpectedly says "Was it your poor child?
When they return to the home after the funeral to make arrangements for Ada’s possessions, they find that Mrs Lancaster has suddenly departed.
There is an elderly vicar, a talkative B&B landlady called Mrs Copleigh, and a Miss Bligh who seems to run the parish.
He discovers the painting was by an artist called Boscowan who died several years ago.
Tommy and Albert then find a hidden letter from Aunt Ada, in which she suspects there is malice in Sunny Ridge.
After she chose to abort the baby (“I was a dancer, I didn’t want a child... the doctor said it would be all right, but it wasn’t all right”), she took up with a criminal gang; they used the house to hide their loot.
Later she left that life behind and got married, hoping to have a family, but could not conceive again and in her grief and guilt over the abortion became unhinged and started killing children.
After her candour, Mrs Lancaster attempts to kill Tuppence, first with poisoned milk, then with a metal blade.
"[5] 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.
"[6] In 2005, the novel was adapted by the French director Pascal Thomas under the title Mon petit doigt m'a dit...[citation needed] The novel was adapted into a television film in 2006 as part of the Agatha Christie's Marple series starring Geraldine McEwan even though Christie did not write Marple into the original story.
The time in which this adaptation is set is somewhere between the late 1940s and the early 1950s, but unclear and slightly inconsistent: a US B-17 (which left the UK soon after the war and was out of US service by 1949) overflies the village, yet US airmen wear the blue USAF uniform introduced in 1949, and there is also a 1951 Festival of Britain poster in the village shop.