It may be the most haunting verse Christie ever used.Īt the time she had just killed him off, but nobody was allowed to read his last adventure ( Curtain) until her own last days, thirty years later. For instance, during much of Maud the homicide narrator thinks he is dead, and at the end of The Hollow (1946) we discover that in his last word the murdered man had set up a most effective mechanism to prevent detection of his murderer. The Hollow’s connection with its epigraph isn’t obvious, but richly rewards digging. Hickory Dickory Dock (1955) does nothing with its rhyme, and relatively little with anything else. Five Little Pigs (1942/3) involved Hercule Poirot investigating a 16-year-old murder of the artist Amyas Crale for which his wife Caroline had been sentenced, dying in prison Poirot’s chief evidence oral and written is from five survivors one of whom he finds to have been the actual murderer (Robert Barnard, in his A Talent to Deceive (1980) - perhaps the best critique of Christie - thought it her best): the crucial witnesses are admirably profiled as the individual pigs of the rhyme beginning ‘This Little Pig …’.

Agatha Christie had made previous use of (nursery) rhymes to supply titles with varying success in the past. ALFRED TENNYSON, Maud - A Monodrama (1855) Part 1, I.i The red-ribbed ledges drip with a silent horror of blood,Īnd Echo there whatever is asked her, answers ‘Death.’ Its lips in the field above are dabbled with blood-red heath, I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood,

Poirot the hollow