A Pocket Full of Rye is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on November 9, 1953 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company the following year. The UK edition retailed at ten shillings and sixpence (10/6)and the US edition at $2.75. The book features her detective Miss Marpl
Plot summary
When wealthy Rex Fortescue dies while having tea, the police are baffled. Mr. Fortescue died during his morning tea in his office and the diagnosis was that a poison, taxine - a poison found as a mixture of cardiotoxic diterpenes in the leaves, but not the berries (arils), of the European yew tree - had killed him.His wife was the main suspect in the murder, until she also was murdered, after she drank tea laced with cyanide. Her lover, Vivian Dubois, was the suspect next, as well as just about everyone that knew the family. Going on the only clue, a pocket full of rye found on the victim, Miss Marple begins investigating. Marple realizes the murders are arranged according to the pattern of a childhood nursery rhyme, Sing a Song of Sixpence.
The next to be murdered is a maid named Gladys with whom Miss Marple was acquainted. She knew Gladys to be romantic and gullible. The younger Fortescue son, Lancelot, suddenly arrives from Kenya with his new wife. The oldest son, Percival, admits that his father was senile and ruining the business. Miss Marple discovers that the use of the rhyme in the crimes was to point the finger at an old dealing of the Blackbird mine, in which old Fortescue was suspected of having killed his partner, MacKenzie, and swindled the mine from his partner's family. The mine is in Kenya. Thinking that one of the two MacKenzie children is responsible, Miss Marple and Inspector Neele trace Jennifer Fortescue (Percival's wife) to be the daughter of Mackenzie - something that she does indeed admit, as well as taking responsibility for placing dead blackbirds near Rex at various times to remind him of his past crimes. Jennifer's involvement, however, turns out to be a red herring as the murderer is, in fact, Lancelot. He had found out that the Blackbird mine was valuable and wanted to inherit it, and so he met and romanced his scapegoat: Gladys. He talked her into joining the Fortescue household and administering the poison in Rex's morning marmalade, telling her that it was a truth drug and fabricating her a story about needing old Fortescue to tell the truth in order to clear his name for something that he had been falsely accused of. Then, he killed Gladys so that she wouldn't turn him in, and killed his stepmother so that the inheritance went to the children.
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