A Pocket Full of Rye

 A Pocket Full of Rye (1953) by Agatha Christie

London businessman Rex Fortescue, a wily wheeler-dealer, has stepped on a lot of toes on his way up the financial ladder. But could any of the people he bamboozled have had access to his morning tea? 

Not long after Fortescue's glamorous secretary brings him a cup of his special blend in his very special china tea cup, he gasps out, "What did you put in the tea?!" and falls unconscious. An ambulance (or two) is called in and so is Inspector Neele of the Yard (though Fortescue hasn't died...yet). Neele begins asking questions of the office staff while waiting to hear from the hospital about the man's condition. When the call comes, it's to tell Neele that Fortescue is dead--most certainly poisoned and the doctor is nearly certain that it's taxine poisoning. Taxine is slow-acting (so the tea is not the culprit) and comes from yew leaves. And the name of Fortescue's home is Yew Lodge, named so because of the yew trees all about.

So...it would seem that the poison was administered at home. When it's discovered that his widow had a lover and anticipated inheriting a tidy sum upon Fortescue's death, she becomes the prime suspect. At least until she winds up poisoned as well. Then Inspector Neele and Sergeant Hay find themselves needing to dig deeper. One of the clues found upon Fortescue was a handful of rye in his pocket. The connection is made that Rex (meaning "king") was in his counting house when he became ill and that his "queen" was in the parlor having bread (scones) and honey when she died. Is this merely a case of an unbalanced mind using the old nursery rhyme to select their victims. When the maid is strangled while in the garden and found with a clothes pin "nipping her nose," it would certainly seem so. And when Miss Jane Marple arrives (the maid Gladys had previously been in Miss Marple's service), she tells Neele to look for blackbirds--for their most certainly must be blackbirds.

And there are...dead blackbirds were left on Fortescue's desk at home. Dead blackbirds were stuffed into a pie. And at one point Fortescue had swindled a man over something called the Blackbird Mine and possibly left him to die in Africa. The man's widow had sworn vengeance and vowed to train their children to seek revenge if she couldn't get it. Has vengeance come from that quarter? Miss Marple manages to get into the house and ask the questions that the police can't and she helps Neele see that there is more to a nursery rhyme than meets the eye.

Rex Fortescue isn't the only wily one connected to this story. The author was pretty wily herself. I read all the Christie mysteries that the Wabash Carnegie Library had back when I first discovered her (nearly 40 years ago!) and I'm sure this was one of them. And she fooled me again. I thought for sure I remembered which red herring I fell for when I first read it and, by golly, she wasn't going to get me with that again. And she didn't. But I fell for another one. She's that good. And that's one of the reasons why I can reread her books with such enjoyment. If it's been long enough since the last reading, then there's a good chance I'll be mystified all over again. Great fun!

The one small quibble I have is that Miss Marple shows up so very late in the book. Of course, she's tied to the maid, so that makes sense and there really isn't any other way to make her presence plausible--but if it's going to be a Miss Marple mystery, I'd like to see more of her. Even with that small disappointment, it's still a great read and a great mystery. ★★★★

First line: It was Miss Summers turn to make the tea.

Last line: And then, displacing both of these emotions, there came a surge of triumph--the triumph some specialist might feel who has successfully reconstructed an extinct animal from a fragment of jawbone and a couple of teeth.
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Deaths = 5 (two poisoned; one strangled; one in war; one shot)