Marple Retrospective #2 - A Pocket Full of Rye

Marple Retrospective #2 - A Pocket Full of Rye

Well, this was unexpectedly good! Part of Christie's "nursery rhyme" series (along with Hickory Dickory Dock, One Two Buckle My Shoe, Crooked House, and, after a fashion, And Then There Were None and Five Little Pigs), it was published in 1953 and followed the Poirot novel After the Funeral, which was only middling in quality. 

This novel has it all, in terms of Christie Tropes: An isolated house with a dissatisfied, unhappy wealthy family. All the character types are here: a tyrannical patriarch; a simpering straightlaced son; a charismatic black sheep who flees to Kenya; an bored housewife; a trophy wife; a mysterious maid; a drunk butler... the works. It's all here. 

Interestingly, Miss Marple herself is barely in it - maybe in 10-15% of the book - and the protagonist is really Inspector Neele, who is fantastic. He is someone who shapes his demeanor to the suspect; he can appear upper class, lower class, intelligent, idiotic, avuncular, threatening... a very wise and clever detective. Above all, he's a good listener. Miss Marple, when she appears, immediately recognizes like for like, and they get on splendidly - a  real pleasure. 

This book has not one, not two, but THREE murders, all seemingly based on the nursery rhyme Sing a Song of Sixpence. I successfully guessed half of the mystery, and the motive, but I was wrong about identity. I'm avoiding spoilers, which is hard, but this one is worth reading, I think.

Like most mid/late period Christie, this is full of reflections on modern post-war Britain - the dying out of the servant class; the dying out of the Old Aristocracy; the collapse of the British Empire; the rise in crime post WWII; gender roles beginning to shift; more modern understanding of mental illness; and, above all (below all?) a very comprehensive understanding of human nature, which - to Christie - is almost uniformly sordid. 

While Christie wrote 35 or so Poirot novels, she only wrote 12 with Miss Marple. I've read three: The Body in the Library, The Mirror Crack'd From Side to Side (as a kid), and now this. This is the best of them, and really has all the hallmarks of Peak Christie. In my rankings below, I put it as the final ranked novel in The Best. 

It doesn't quite have the panache or scope of Murder on the Orient Express, or Death on the Nile, nor the shocking modernist reflexism of Roger Ackroyd, nor the near perfection of the form in Five Little Pigs and ABC Murders ... it's most similar to the Poirot novel The Hollow: an unhappy family is shaken up by murder, old sins cast long shadows, and as Longfellow says: the mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. 

Worth a read!