Title: Five Little Pigs
Author: Agatha Christie
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 240
Rating: 8/10
Agatha Christie – Five Little Pigs
This book is one of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels, and so as such, you should already know what to expect. It’s also interesting because the plot is loosely centred on the “this little piggy” nursery rhyme in which one went to market, one stayed at home, one had roast beef, one had none, and one cried “wee wee wee” all the way home. She uses nursery rhymes a couple of times in her work, and she always takes it and twists it and makes it work well in the context of a cracking whodunnit.
It’s also worth mentioning that a big chunk of this book is dedicated to the written testimonies of some of the people who were present at the time of the murder, because it all happened sixteen years ago. This angle on things has been used before throughout literature – a novel written in this style is called an epistolary novel – but it’s interesting to see how Christie took it and applied it to the detective genre.
Overall, I’d say that this is one of the better Agatha Christie books and a nice little Hercule Poirot read, but – almost inevitably considering the amount of her work that’s out there – there are better ones on the market. This has a lot of reasons to recommend it, though!
Agatha Christie
