A Pocket Full of Rye (Miss Marple Mysteries),   ISBN:9780451199867

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A good Miss Marple mystery. Though Miss Marple is not mentioned in it as often as I'd expect. At the center of a mystery is a very unpleasant family. They are not likeable characters. The plot twists got me again, and the murderer turned out to be someone I did not want it to be! The very last page is priceless. Reading the last page made the whole book worthwhile. Don't know how Christie does that...

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What "improvements" have been made for the Signet edition? There are already major differences in punctuation, word choices, and scene breaks between the original Collins and Dodd Mead editions of this novel. There are further differences between the Dodd Mead editions republished by Random House/Avenel and the Dodd Mead editions republished by Simon & Shuster/Pocket. There are further additions still in the Bantam, Berkley, and Black Dog & Leventhal editions. For every publishing house putting out her works, there seem to be a new batch of editors altering Agatha Christie's words and the sound of her voice. What's the matter with these publishers? Whose voice do they think we want to hear when we sit down to a novel by Agatha Christie? And what will she sound like twenty years from now? It's frightening that her estate has failed to see the importance of guarding her words as she wrote them. Please tell me I'm not the only one here who senses that a crime has been committed.

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"A Pocket Full of Rye" may perhaps be the best novel Christie wrote that features Miss Jane Marple. It is, at heart, a mystery with an ingenious setup that revolves around a familiar nursery rhyme. With murders happening aplenty and somewhat unexpectedly, this is a mystery that will keep readers on their toes until the very end.

When Rex Fortescue is poisoned, suspicion immediately falls upon his young, second wife, an unfaithful woman who definitely had a motive to kill her husband. As do several (if not all) of his family members. Yet when a second poisoning claims the live of Mrs. Fortescue, she is wiped out as a suspect, but someone else within the family is definitely confirmed as the murderer. Almost every family member, or someone connected with them, had something to gain from these two deaths. Miss Marple becomes involved because one of her old serving girls is the third murder victim, filling out the last two lines of the nursery rhyme. Miss Marple helps put the detective in charge along the right track, separating murder from pranks, and finding the heartless killer among the family ranks.

"A Pocket Full of Rye" is a fast-paced mystery, as are many of Christie's works, but it is spurred on by its unique story and a compelling cast of characters. As CID Inspector Neele says many times, every member of the Fortescue family is 'unpleasant', as are most of the people who work for them. As with other Christie works where Miss Marple helps out a detective, the mystery is solved but justice isn't necessarily served out in the end.

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Ok, there is little point reviewing an Agatha Christie mystery. It would be equivalent to saying that Kasparov plays a good game of chess, or that Mike Tyson hits hard. You just know that Dame Christie can spin a great yarn of intrigue, and this is no exception. Pocket Full of Rye beings with a dead body (with a pocket full of rye no less!) and suspects aplenty. As it turns out, almost everyone in the house had a reason for offing poor Mr. Fortescue. Then more murders occur, which by definition one would think would make the mystery easier to solve as there are less suspects. However, Ms. Christie is too clever for that, and much as in And Then There Were None, the reader is baffled until the very end.

My only [small] complaint is that Miss Marple is a relatively small part of the novel, and it would have been nice to see a tad more of her.

Relic113

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Mr. Fortescue was sitting in his office, drinking his normal morning tea, when the secretary heard him screaming for his life. When ambulances finally arrived and got him to the hospital, he was dead. The diagnosis was that a poison, taxine had killed him. This can be found in yew berries, and Mr. Fortescue lived on Yewtree Lodge. His wife was the main suspect in the murder, until she also was murdered. Her lover, Mr. Dubois, was the suspect next. Just about everyone that knew the family was a suspect. On the same day that Mrs. Fortescue died, the maid, Gladys, died also. This is when Miss Marple came to stay at Yewtree Lodge. She worked together with Inspector Neele, even though they had completely different thought patterns about what had happened. Inspector Neele eventually came to the conclusion that Percival, the son of Mr. Fortescue, was the murderer. While staying at Yewtree, Miss Marple made her own discoveries, biased on what the family members had told her. Neele was wrong, and soon agreed with Miss Marple that the other son, Lance had killed his father. Even though Lance was in Africa during all of the murders, Miss Marple proved that he had come back in the summer and given Gladys taxine, while pretending to be her boyfriend. He told her that the taxine would make Mr. Fortescue tell the truth, so Gladys put it in his marmalade. The marmalade wasn't eaten for months later, so Lance was in Africa when his father died. This gave him a strong alibi. He also killed Gladys and Mrs. Fortescue. He lured Gladys outside, pretending to be her boyfriend again, and then strangled her. Then he came to the front door and met up with his wife, pretending to just have arrived. While have tea with his step-mother, he pretended to drop sugar in her tea, but it was actually poison. Inspector Neele would never have discovered any of this without Miss Marple. This book was written with a surprise ending. This was a good book, but it had too many characters. An interesting part was that the murders fit perfectly with a nursery rhyme. Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone looking to read a good murder mystery book.
The book was written so the person least likely to be the murderer turned out to be it. Lance was fired from his father's business, and moved to Africa. When his father was murdered, he was still in Africa. This made it seem nearly impossible for him to have committed three murders while being on a completely different continent. Percival, the other son was used as a distraction from Lance, and was portrayed as the murderer for a good part of the book. The MacKenzie's were also used as a distraction from Lance being the murderer. Mr. Fortescue left Mr. MacKenzie in Africa to die, so his family probably wanted revenge. All of these characters were used to make Lance seem less and less likely to be the murderer.
There were too many characters. The author created too many suspects, so it got hard to follow. There were maids and housekeepers and cooks and a lot of relatives all living at Yewtree. This made them all suspects, and they kept being brought up. This made it hard to keep up with what was going on in the murder being solved. Also, the book seemed to go on and on, going through all of the possibilities of where everyone was during the murder.
The murders were planned to fit a Mother Goose nursery rhyme. Miss Marple discovered that the murders perfectly fit the nursery rhyme about blackbirds. The people were killed in the same order and Mr. Fortescue was even killed with a grain of rye in his pocket. Gladys was killed with a clothes pin on her nose, to symbolize a bird snipping off her nose. The all seemed to be an odd plan the murderer was doing, until it was discovered that Gladys was killed before Mrs. Fortescue, which made it not fit with the rhyme anymore.
This was a very interesting book that keeps the reader on the edge of their seat the entire book. There are many twists and turns that keep you guessing on who will be suspect next. It is almost impossible to tell who the true murderer is until the very end. Paying attention while reading this book is very important, but the book is a great mystery book that would be good for almost everyone, as long as you're willing to keep up with all of the different characters that come in and out of the book.

A. Stone