Miss Marple: A Pocket Full of Rye
“Wherever there is a question of gain, one has to be very suspicious. The great thing to avoid is having in any way a trustful mind”
p165
Hello Everyone,
It feels like a while since I wrote about a Miss Marple book! This week I have a fun one for you. In this book it really feels like Christie has locked in the key elements of Miss Marple’s method and character, as the quote above indicates!
As well as locking in Miss Marple’s character, you can tell in this one that Christie also recognized that “murder in a small town” plots were possible starting to get old, so she flips the script, and instead of Miss Marple stumbling on the murder, or being invited to solve it by either the police or the vicar’s wife, she actively seeks out this case after seeing it in the paper!
In A Pocket Full of Rye, a rather shady businessman is poisoned, and the clues quickly link themselves to the nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence”
Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye,
Four and twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie.
When the pie was opened
The birds began to sing—
Wasn’t that a dainty dish
To set before the king?
The king was in the counting-house
Counting out his money,
The queen was in the parlor
Eating bread and honey,
The maid was in the garden
Hanging out the clothes.
Along came a blackbird
And snipped off her nose.
I really did enjoy the different connection that Miss Marple has to this case (I don’t want to give to much away, but it involves a former employee and a notice in the paper), and the characters were twisty and fun. I do love when murder mystery does a good job of making everyone suspect. The end of this case is also great, with a super fun twist on the “catch the murderer” piece of the plot.
I did sometimes feel like there were a LOT of characters who were never fully realized, whom you never got to know all that well, and this made the story feel a bit brief at times (I think this is a definite theme to these books as a whole). This is usually the most frustrating when a character seems suspicious, and yet you never find out what is really going on. If you say a character went on a walk and they act shifty about it, you need to explain why at some point!
Adaptations
When a book has this many characters, you have to cut a few to make a good TV adaptation, and that isn’t always a bad thing either. I think I may have preferred the book in this case, but these were fine.
1985 – A Pocketful of Rye – Joan Hickson
This adaptation was fine. This was less faithful to the original story than most of this series, and I don’t think that served it well. I felt like the character condensation didn’t serve to help make the existing characters better, and I did sort of hate the ending too (the book ending is SO good, and this does away with that).
2009 – A Pocket Full of Rye – Julie McKenzie
Of the two adaptations, this is probably the more successful, as it adds new scenes, but generally sticks to the overall concept and plot, and the new scenes do a great job of setting the whole thing up. I actually enjoyed watching this quite a bit, but they took away the best character (Aunt Effie), and that meant I couldn’t love it.
I’ll be back next week with a look at my March reads, and I hope you are all having a good week!
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