Customer Reviews

Pocket Full of Rye (Miss Marple)

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Almost every formula, idea, and trick that Agatha Christie used in her detective fiction works proved to be entirely successful and won her an enormous reading public. Making use of nursery rhymes was one such formula. Nursery rhymes can reawaken the sense of wonder, mystery and enchantment in any reader. They also can carry symbolic levels of meaning, and some are allegories.

In this her 1953 offering she makes use of the nursery rhyme "Sing A Song Of Sixpence". Appropriately it is one of her Miss Marple books. Although her elderly spinster sleuth has little to do here, and is late making her appearance, it is she who perceives and urges the significance of the nursery rhyme. "Don't you see, it makes a pattern to all this."

The murders occur in the disfunctional family of Rex Fortescue, a financier, and the action occurs in his London office and in the family home, Yew Tree Lodge. The opening chapters are wonderfully engaging. Agatha Christie, when she took the trouble, could sketch characters vividly. Amongst all of them in this book, there are not more than a handful of suspects. To compensate, Mrs Christie throws in buckets full of red herrings.

You'll enjoy the puzzle, and having innumerable theories suggested and dismissed. The solution, when it comes, however, is no more plausible than is the likelihood of a blackbird pecking off a maid's nose.

If you can obtain the unabridged reading of the book by Rosemary Leach, your enjoyment will be enhanced. Rosemary Leach is unusually skilled at "doing" the voices of a large cast of characters, male and female.

What "improvements" have been made for the Signet edition? There are already major differences in punctuation, word choices, and scene breaks between the original Collins and Dodd Mead editions of this novel. There are further differences between the Dodd Mead editions republished by Random House/Avenel and the Dodd Mead editions republished by Simon & Shuster/Pocket. There are further additions still in the Bantam, Berkley, and Black Dog & Leventhal editions. For every publishing house putting out her works, there seem to be a new batch of editors altering Agatha Christie's words and the sound of her voice. What's the matter with these publishers? Whose voice do they think we want to hear when we sit down to a novel by Agatha Christie? And what will she sound like twenty years from now? It's frightening that her estate has failed to see the importance of guarding her words as she wrote them. Please tell me I'm not the only one here who senses that a crime has been committed.

When an unpleasant businessman is taken ill at his London office and subsequently dies of taxine poisoning, authorities discover a house full of likely suspects: a young, sexy wife having an affair; a money grubbing son worried about his father's management of the family business; an angry daughter frustrated in love by her father's control. But no sooner do police suspicions begin to form around one of the three than murder strikes again--and then again--in such a way as to leave them baffled. Enter, of course, Miss Marple, who sets about uncovering a killer who may be a psychotic that is killing victims in accordance with the old "Sing a Song of Sixpence" nursey rhyme.

Most of Christie's great novels were written in the 1930s and 1940s. Although she could still create a stunner when she wished, with A MURDER IS ANNOUNCED a case in point, by the 1950s Christie favored a less complicated approach, preferring to write novels that might be described as creamy confections for a very civilized high tea. A POCKET FULL OF RYE is perhaps the perfect example. Like most Christie novels, the plot is extremely contrived--but in this instance she makes no effort to conceal the contrivance; it is a shell game, pure and simple and without pretension, a game undertaken for the pleasure of it. And when Christie sets out to write a novel for the pure fun of it, there is always a great deal of fun to be had. This will never rank among her greatest works, but fans will devour it in a single sitting and feel as satisified as if they had just enjoyed a blow-out of cream buns. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Once again, "The Queen of Crime" pleased me with another thrilling mystery. Even more delightful, this book follows a similar pattern to "Three Blind Mice and Other Stories" and "Hickory Dickory Dock." When Agatha Christie sets out to write a story with a nursery rhyme pattern it is truly suspenseful and intriguing.

This installmen in Christie's large collection has Miss Marple, my favorite of her detectives, trying to solve the mystery of the poisoning of financier Rex Fortescue with taxeine. This case hits close to home for Miss Marple since Gladys Martin, a domestic maid whom she had trained for service becomes a victim of the killer. The culprit is following a bizarre pattern of using the "Sing a Song of Sixpence" nursery rhyme, and thus three victims are discovered. Rex Fortescue is discovered upon death to have a coat pocket full of rye grain, his young wife, Adelle Fortescue is discovered dead over a meal of scones and honey, and Gladys is discovered strangled with a clothespin on her nose, (A cruel imitation of "The little blackbird who nipped off the maids nose.") Miss Marple uses the nursery rhyme to discover the guilty person, and the motive is both enraging and poignant. Since there is a lemited amount of suspects, Christie superbly develops the characters and purposefully misleads the reader with plenty of red herrings.

The characters in this particular installment are not as likable as in previous books of the series, but they each have complex personalities. Perhaps my favorite character is Jennifer Fortescue, whom I can relate too in a way. Of course, Miss Marple is unforgettable, and I cannot help but wish that Christie would have put more of her in to the book. Inspector Neal is fine, but Craddock is my personal favorite police officer in Christie's Miss Marple series. However, this book is terrific, and should be read by all mystery fans as a cozy whodunit that is both poignant and mostly fun. Happy reading to you all.

Or so did Ms Marple say to one of her characters in the book, if I remember it rightly. This book stands out for me through the brilliant, albeit grisly, usage of the old nursery rhyme "Four & Twenty Blackbirds".

The first chapter described the death of Rex Fortescue in great detail, although those details curtail none of the man's suffering but his assistants worries: whether their boss is having a sudden attack of epilepsy, drunk, or simply dying. I find this chapter very funny - I have a very strange sense of humour, so sue me - and sets the motion for the proceeding chapters when more of the rhyme came into fulfilment: the dead queen in the parlour, the maid with a clothespin on her nose to make up for the 'bird came and nipped her nose' and even the pie that contained dead blackbirds, which of course, accounts for the first part of the rhyme.

Ms Marple commented these things in the book as horribly childish, and she set out to seek the murderer who not only killed from afar but also killed merely out of covering his/her own sad behind. Another brilliant novel from the Dame.

"A Pocket Full of Rye" may perhaps be the best novel Christie wrote that features Miss Jane Marple. It is, at heart, a mystery with an ingenious setup that revolves around a familiar nursery rhyme. With murders happening aplenty and somewhat unexpectedly, this is a mystery that will keep readers on their toes until the very end.

When Rex Fortescue is poisoned, suspicion immediately falls upon his young, second wife, an unfaithful woman who definitely had a motive to kill her husband. As do several (if not all) of his family members. Yet when a second poisoning claims the live of Mrs. Fortescue, she is wiped out as a suspect, but someone else within the family is definitely confirmed as the murderer. Almost every family member, or someone connected with them, had something to gain from these two deaths. Miss Marple becomes involved because one of her old serving girls is the third murder victim, filling out the last two lines of the nursery rhyme. Miss Marple helps put the detective in charge along the right track, separating murder from pranks, and finding the heartless killer among the family ranks.

"A Pocket Full of Rye" is a fast-paced mystery, as are many of Christie's works, but it is spurred on by its unique story and a compelling cast of characters. As CID Inspector Neele says many times, every member of the Fortescue family is 'unpleasant', as are most of the people who work for them. As with other Christie works where Miss Marple helps out a detective, the mystery is solved but justice isn't necessarily served out in the end.

When a rich man dies under very mysterious circumstances, Miss Marple becomes interested. However, when she begins to really follow the details of what has happened, she quickly realizes that more murders are sure to follow. This is a very deep mystery, and only Jane Marple can find out what is really going on and why!

Jane Marple was the literary creation of that most famous of English mystery writers, Agatha Christie (1890-1976). For those of you unfamiliar with Miss Marple, she was your stereotypical elderly spinster-lady, who loves to gossip and grow her flowers. But, even more, she has a razor-sharp mind that she uses to solve mysteries, using her own brand of lateral thinking that allows her see clearer than anyone else around her.

This is actually Agatha Christie's sixth Miss Marple novel, written in 1953. (The first one was The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), and the second one was Sleeping Murder, which was written in 1940 but locked away to be published after Ms. Christie's death in 1976.) Overall, I found this to be a fascinating read. If you love a good mystery, then get this book - it is a great mystery, one of the best ones ever written. I give this book my highest recommendations!

This was one of a string of Agatha Christie mysteries I read in
a very short time, but it is the only one which has really stuck
with me. What sets it apart is the unusually fine character
portrayal, the ingenuity of the crime and its solution, and the
striking contrast between the wry humor which pervades much of
the book and the wrenching effect of its final pages (noted by a
previous reviewer). I'd never have expected to find a Christie
work thought-provoking, but this one was.

The seventh book to feature Agatha Christie's famous spinster sleuth concerns the mysterious death of Rex Fortescue, a powerful businessman with a rather unpleasant family who in turn have about a dozen different motives for killing him. There's the pretty young wife who is clearly having an affair, the suppressed daughter who was chafing under her father's control, the impatient young son who was concerned about the wellbeing of his father's business empire, and rumors of a family vendetta from years ago, involving an African goldmine.

Inspector Neele is put in charge of the case, one that seems relatively straightforward what with the news that Fortescue was poisoned by taxine, a substance that was easily found in the yew tree berries that grow in abundance at Yewtree Lodge. This clearly implicates someone living at the household, whether it be a member of the dissolute family, or one of the servants - Neely in particular is intrigued by the impeccably calm and composed Mary Dove. More puzzling however, is why on earth Mr Fortescue had a pocketful of rye in his jacket, which seems a singularly pointless thing for him to have been carrying.

But then two more bodies turn up in swift succession, both of which seem wholly unconnected. Neele's attention is suddenly drawn to Mr Fortescue's sons, the amusingly named Percival and Lancelot, who are respectively the white and black sheep of the family. Yet both have impeccable alibis...

Christie often drew upon nursery rhymes in order to construct a mystery (such as Hickory Dickory Dock and One, Two, Buckle My Shoe) and here it is "Sing a Song of Sixpence" that gets the treatment, complete with the king in his counting house, the queen in the parlor, and the maid hanging out the clothes. Miss Marple has figured out the pattern, and believes that the murders must therefore have something to do with blackbirds, however unlikely this connection may seem.

As you may have guessed, the set-up and solution are borderline ridiculous, but that Christie wrote this book for fun is very clear - it's a puzzle, nothing more, with the usual fare of red herrings, mistaken identities, false leads and so on. The characters are lightly sketched, the murders are ticked off in quick succession, and though there is some amount of pathos involved concerning Miss Marple's desire for justice for the pathetic housemaid, the entire story is mostly presented as an intellectual puzzle, nothing more.

Miss Marple takes a while to turn up (it's not until chapter thirteen that she makes her appearance), however, unlike some Christie novels, which take time for the body count to stack up, this one wastes no time in delivering cadavers to the reader. In essence, "A Pocketful of Rye" is vintage Christie. No one would ever describe it as her best work, but it's a comfortable read that is pure enjoyment from start to finish.

Agatha Christie the peerless Queen of Crime wrote " A Pocket Full of Rye" in 1953. The short novel has been adapted for television in 1986 by the BBC. Critics rate it as one of the finest of the Miss Jane Marple mysteries.

The story opens with the unexpected death of Rex Fortescue, a wealthy and unscrupulous business mogul, who is found dead by his sexy secretary Miss Grovesnor in his London office. Toxicology results report that the murdered man died of poison in his tea. Fortescue is also found with rye in his pocket.

Inspector Neele of the police arrive to report the death to the Fortescue family at Yewtree Lodge their home. Later there are two more murders. Whodunit?

The chief suspects:

Percival and Jennifer Fortescue-the nerdy older son of Rex and his wife who has a mysterious past. They received a good deal of money as a bequest by Rex in his will.

Lancelot Fortescue and his wife Pat. The prodigal son returns home from East Africa. He is planning to marry the fetching Irish widow Pat.

Elaine Fortescue;the daughter of Rex who wishes to marry Gerald Wright.

Helen MacKenzie-An elderly widow of a man who had business dealings with Rex.

Mary Dove-the suspicious acting chief of staff at Yew Lodge

Mrs. Effie Ramsbottom-the elderly sister of Rex's first wife. She enjoys religious mission literature considering everyone at Yewtree Lodge to be evil.

Adele Fortescue-The second wife of Rex. She has a lover named Vivian Dubois. Adele is thirty years younger than her husband. Her motive to murder may have been her desire to cash in on the money she would receive from Rex's will bequest.

Gladys Martin-the plain and stupid maid who was formerly employed by Mrs. Marple

(two of these characters will themselves be murdered!)

A Pocket Full of Rye is an excellent Miss Marple mystery novel! Pick it up and enjoy a few hours of mystery utilizing your own art of detection!