Rating: 
Summary: A CLASSIC ENGLISH WHODUNIT
Review: A Pocket Full of Rye brings out the best of Dame Agatha. It combines the classic English murder mystery with a nursery rhyme to produce a mystifying turn of events. I am not overly fond of Miss Marple, but I have to admit that she performs delightfully well in this book. It is with the most acute of minds that Christie uses another nursery rhyme to carryout her murders--there is that sense of inevitability and pattern that comes along with it. Christie is a master of the classic and cutting-edge. This is one of her better classics.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Plot, Excellent Execution Combine for Great Read
Review: Agatha Christie gives us an excellent addition to her "nursery rhyme" mysteries with this one. The king in the counting house counting out his money is Rex Fortescue, financial giant who dies at his London office in the course of a normal working day. For reasons unknown, his coat contains a pocket full of rye. The queen in the parlour who was eating bread and honey is his young second wife, rumored to have married him for his money. Although she is the first suspect, her murder the following afternoon after a tea of scones and honey, shifts suspicion. That same afternoon, the housemaid Glady Martin is also found dead. While unpegging clothes from the clothesline, someone strangled her with a stocking and left a clothespin attached to her nose to complete the rhyme's final line "When there came a little bird and nipped off her nose." It is the death of the maid that brings Miss Jane Marple into the case. Gladys had been one of the village girls Miss Marple had trained for domestic service. Miss Marple considers it her duty to find the person who killed Gladys, and with Inspector Neele, the investigator in charge of the case, she does just that. The book is filled with possible suspects: Percival, the eldest son along with his wife and daughter; a younger son Lancelot and his wife; Miss Effie Ramsbottom, an elderly aunt; and several suspicious servants. Once again, it is Miss Marple's life-long experience with wickedness and her understanding of a young girl's mind that leads her to the solution of this outstanding mystery.
Rating:
Summary: Not many suspects, but buckets full of red herrings.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Not many suspects, but buckets full of red herrings.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Another of Dame Agatha's Twisted Nursery Rhymes
Review: Christie wrote several books with nursery rhymes themes, HICKORY DICKORY DEATH being another. She also dealt with dysfunctional families several times, HERCULE POIROT'S CHRISTMAS and 4:50 FROM PADDINGTON were two. In this work she combined the two ideas. Rex Fortescue was a very rich and quite unpleasant man. He ran his family and his business with an iron fist. One morning his very efficient secretary took in his morning tea and found him dying. While investigating his death the police were met with one puzzle after another, what killed Mr. Fortescue?, how was it administered? and why did he have a pocket full of rye grain? As they were beginning to get some answers another murder occurred and then yet another each bringing more confusion to the scene. Jane Marple arrives to the house and begins to sort through the tangle of clues to steer the police in the right direction. This story may seem quite familiar. The Fortescue family is Christie's standard - domineering, wealthy father who keeps most of his family trapped in the family home, under his control. An errant "black sheep" child returns just as the murders begin and there are many family secrets. Although the story is somewhat formulistic it is still a well told tale and a fairly laid out puzzle. All the clues are there for the reader to use to try to solve the mystery before the last chapter. The only drawbacks for Miss Marple fans are that Miss Marple doesn't arrive nearly half way through the book and that it is not set in St. Mary Mead.
Rating:
Summary: A Thoroughly Compelling Whodunit
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: "Children are cruel, cruel little things..."
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: "Children are cruel, cruel little things..."
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: A nice afternoon's outing
Review: The hard thing about reading a Christie for something other than the first time is that you can't tell whether you worked it out before the end through extra cleverness (the preference), or simply though an unknown working of memory (sadly, the probably truth). Nevertheless, let the record show that i did, on this occassion at least, outthink the Queen, and come to the solution chapters before she revealed it. The characters are a good mixture, not all of them likeable ~ Percival, in fact, is quite obnoxious; i would have been happy to see him cast as murderer ~ and several with secondary motivations that are revealed at the right time. The lead policemant, Inspector Neele, is one of the more attractive creations Chirstie has made ~ much better than Dermott Craddock, for example ~ though, naturally, subservient to and not fully understanding the value of Miss Marple. Another nice touch in "Rye" is that Miss Marple doesn't appear until well into the story; nor is too much made of her, as we see far more of Neele than we do her. All in all, if not the most difficult puzzle Christie's ever set, a satisfying book for an afternoon's reading.
Rating:
Summary: An Enjoyable High Tea With Dame Agatha
Review: 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.
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