“A Pocket Full of Rye” by Agatha Christie – Rhymes from the Dark Past

When we think about the many trials and tribulations faced by some of our favorite recurring characters in literature, one of the most obvious ones we don't think about is just how much terror and death they have witnessed without letting it touch them.

Perhaps Miss Marple is the epitome of iron old ladies, being capable of making it from one end of the English countryside to the next without going mad from witnessing swarms of stabbings, poisonings, hangings, and “accidents”.

In Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie, Miss Marple is at it again she is called upon to bring some clarity into the sudden and yet relatively-expected demise of a wealthy tycoon, Rex Fortescue... a murder by poisoning. The suspicions fall on his money-grubbing wife, with everyone believing it to be an attempt by her to claim his money.

However, that theory reveals itself slightly problematic once the wife turns up dead. And for good measure, someone also decided to do the maid in. With a bucket list of suspects to go through, a river full of red herrings and no clear motives, Miss Marple finds herself in her natural habitat and proceeds to unravel this complex web of intrigue, one that sees its resolution in an old nursery rhyme and a deep, dark, shadowy past.

With all the fantastic stories Agatha Christie has written over the years there are bound to be a few overshadowed ones out there, and this is certainly one of them.

In itself, the mystery is one of the more engaging ones in my opinion, as it rapidly wipes from the table any possibly-clear and predictable solutions this mystery may have had, and dumps the reader in the middle of a chaotic setting with little to grasp for help.

It's a real pleasure to see how Miss Marple manages to untangle this whole mess, and let me tell you right now that even the most seasoned readers of detective mysteries will have trouble seeing through it all.

As always, we are given just as much of a chance at solving the mystery as Miss Marple, making this mystery, just like every other Agatha Christie work, a fair one.

As is rather often the case with whodunit novels, much of the focus is placed on the cast of characters we take for suspects, and in this case they are the numerous members of a household.

As you can imagine, they are all rather distinct from each other and have various unique attributes and peculiarities separating them from one another. However, they aren't exactly the cardboard cutouts you are expecting to see, even though some dimensions of them feel slightly cliched.

Very few of the characters can be clearly identified as good or bad, and this kind of moral ambiguity only really serves to heighten the mystery, add intrigue to it and muddle the waters even further.

All things taken into consideration, A Pocket Full of Rye is certainly one of those Agatha Christie novels that ends up being overshadowed by her bigger classics while truly deserving a place under the spotlight.

It is a very solid mystery in every sense of the word, and on top of that adds an interestingly-built setting with intriguing characters to move things along... without, of course, omitting the unforgettable presence of the eternal Miss Marple.

This is a read I definitely recommend to all murder mystery enthusiasts.

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Agatha Christie (15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) Personal site Agatha Christie is thought of by many as being the grandmother of murder mysteries. Throughout her novels, which include the classics And Then There Were None and Death on the Nile, Christie developed many groundbreaking techniques for her time, most of which are being used in one way or another by modern murder mystery writers.