miss marple joan hickson a pocketful of rye

As I mentioned elsewhere, the wonderful Miss Rutherford was a very over-the-top version of Miss Marple, and when you read the books with her in mind, it’s like an indivisible sum – Miss Rutherford into Miss Marple simply won’t go. This was my first exposure to Miss Marple in print, having only known her in the form of Margaret Rutherford on screen. A Pocket Full of Rye, which I always want to write as A Pocketful of Rye, which apparently is wrong. So here we are, having finished the first of my Agatha Christie re-reads.

And just so that you don’t have to worry – I won’t reveal the identity of the murderer! A goldmine, a prodigal son, a nursery rhyme, a vengeful family and an unseen boyfriend all play a part. I think I may have preferred the book in this case, but these were fine.In which Miss Marple solves the murders of a rather hectoring boss and father, and other members of his family and domestic household. 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. If you say a character went on a walk and they act shifty about it, you need to explain why at some point! This is usually the most frustrating when a character seems suspicious, and yet you never find out what is really going on. 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). The end of this case is also great, with a super fun twist on the “catch the murderer” piece of the plot. I do love when murder mystery does a good job of making everyone suspect. 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. 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” 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!

Miss marple joan hickson a pocketful of rye