Novel: Five Little Pigs

Premise
Agatha Christie's Five Little Pigs (also published as Murder in Retrospect) opens with a daughter's plea: her mother, convicted sixteen years earlier for the poisoning of the celebrated artist Amyas Crale, claimed to be innocent before she died. Long after the trial, the surviving daughter asks Hercule Poirot to re-examine the case and decide once and for all whether the verdict was just. Poirot accepts a retrospective investigation built not on fresh physical evidence but on memories, motives and the testimony of five people who were present in the household the day of the murder.

Investigation
Poirot interviews each of the five principal witnesses, friends and relatives whose lives intertwined with Amyas and his wife, and listens to their accounts of the last afternoon and evening before the fatal event. Rather than relying on dramatic interrogations, Poirot reconstructs scenes from fragmentary recollections, noticing what each narrator emphasizes or omits and testing the coherence of their versions against small, telling details. The structure of the inquiry is patient and psychological: Poirot pieces together relationships, jealousies and shifting loyalties, treating memory itself as both evidence and subject.

Resolution
Through careful cross-examination of tone, timing and motive, Poirot shows that the commonly accepted story does not fit the facts. He concludes that the convicted woman was not the murderer and identifies the true perpetrator among those five connected to the household. The revelation hinges not on a dramatic fingerprint or confession but on understanding human behavior: a young woman whose attachment to the artist and fear of abandonment concealed a more complex and damaging impulse. Poirot's solution vindicates the dead woman's reputation, while delivering a melancholy reflection on how chance and misinterpretation can lock a false story into law.

Themes and Style
Five Little Pigs is notable for its emphasis on psychology and the fallibility of memory rather than on clues and red herrings alone. Christie uses Poirot's calm rationality as a lens to probe motives and petty cruelties that fester into catastrophe. The novel's tone is quieter and more reflective than many of Christie's whodunits: the drama lies in reconstructing relationships and in the moral cost of a wrongful conviction. The title's nursery-rhyme echo underscores the story's elegiac quality, where the past, once disturbed, yields both truth and sorrow.