By the Pricking of My Thumbs By the Pricking of My Thumbs 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 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year. The UK edition retailed at twenty-one shillings (21/-) and the US edition at $4.95. It features her detectives Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. Tommy and Tuppence were unusual in that they aged from novel to novel unlike Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, whose age remained more or less the same from Christie's
Tommy and Tuppence this first book "The Secret Adversary" that they meet up after the war, and come to realise that, although they have been friends for most of their lives, they have now fallen in love with each other. Unlike many other recurring detective characters, including the better known Christie detectives, Tommy and Tuppence aged in time with the real world, being in their early twenties in "The Secret Adversary" and in their seventies in "Postern of Fate". In their early appearances, they are portrayed as typical young people of the 1920s, and the stories and settings have a more pronounced period-specific