Читать книгу Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making - Includes Two Unpublished Poirot Stories - John Curran - Страница 42

A sixpenny piece helps to solve a brutal murder that has left a family divided with mutual suspicion.

Although there are no surviving notes for ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’—unsurprisingly, since it made such an early appearance in the Christmas 1929 edition of Holly Leaves—there is a reference to it in Notebook 56. Appearing as it does among the notes for A Pocket Full of Rye, this is unusual in, puzzlingly, also appearing to make reference to the already published Crooked House.

Sing a Song of Sixpence

The crooked sixpence found (a Crooked man Crooked wife

Crooked house)

An aspect of this short story that has escaped the attention of Christie commentators is its similarity to Ordeal by Innocence (see Chapter 7). ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ features the arrival of an outside investigator, Sir Edward Palliser, at the home of Miss Crabtree, who has been murdered by a blow to the head administered by a member of her own household. Because no one has been arrested for the crime, her family describe how ‘they sit there every day looking at each other surreptitiously and wondering’. In this atmosphere of mutual suspicion he reaches a solution which explicitly foreshadows the 1958 novel.