A Pocketful of Rye was the first Agatha Christie book I ever read. It was the only one available in the library and I was eager to read any Christie novel I could find. The fact it based the murders on an old nursery rhyme added interest for me as a teenager, and sure enough it does what it says on the tin. Someone does die in his "counting house", his wife dies in the parlour eating bread and honey, while yet another domestic meets a unfortunate end hanging out the washing (had she not seen the previous Marple mystery A Murder is Announced?). It also has to be said that scene stuck as a vague memory as a child when it was first broadcast in 1985. I remembered little else, and I'm surprised it didn't put me of clothes lines for good as a kid.
Watching it now however gives me the feeling of a novel that hasn't aged well. It's not entirely the adaptation's fault, but the premise of basing a murder mystery on a nursery rhyme. It can be done - such as Van Der Valk's Dr Hoffman's Children (1991) - but by trying to fit exactly how the characters die via the nursery rhyme makes it feel just a little bit silly. It's a shame, as I know I relished the book when I first read it. It certainly affects this adaptation when watching it, but there are other flaws to it. The main one is that most of the main suspects are just a little bland. It's hard to really get worked up when a couple of them start popping off, let alone trying to figure out who out of the dull menagerie of characters could of worked themselves up enough to start bumping off the family. I know Percy Fortescue is meant to be bland, but Clive Merrison is just too monotone, and it's not helped with other cast members either going through the motions (Martyn Stanbridge) or given little to do (Stacy Dorning). One of the few to have genuine charisma is Timothy West, but his character dies within the first 5 minutes, while Peter Davison is cheery enough as Lance, but lacks the genuine suaveness that I remember of Lance in the book. Then there is Annette Badland as timid maid Gladys Martin, who is effective in the role but because of her character has very little scope for developing the character beyond "nervous wreck." The fact that Miss Marple apparently trained her to be a domestic makes me wonder just how bad her other trainees turned out to be!
It's left to the supporting cast to give the more memorable performances, and one of the more interesting ones is Selina Cadell as housekeeper Mary Dove. Her character is warm with an almost bemused attitude to the family, and is as sharply observant as she is intelligent. It's lovely acting by Cadell, who makes her characters more real than some of the other cast members. There are also more showy performances by Merelina Kendall as the terrifying cook Mrs Crump, and Fabia Drake as the deeply religious Miss Henderson, who has nothing but mere contempt for her immoral family, and may have a point as well. Fabia was often wonderfully charismatic and is equally treasurable here. Sadly there are few scenes between her and Joan Hickson.
Indeed, the third flaw is that Hickson has little to do. She slowly senses that something is very wrong at Fortescue House by the newspaper reports and attempted phone calls by Gladys. But when she turns up at the house after finally realizing the similarities between the first two murders and the nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence" to warn the Inspector there (a youngish Tom Wilkinson), he refuses to see her. It is only when the murders have been committed that she is finally allowed in, and then there is very little time for sifting through the clues. Wilkinson is okay in his role, but lends nothing really memorable to the part. And it doesn't help itself by trying to add another element of the nursery rhyme to the mystery when Miss Marple discovers that someone actually left a pie filled with dead blackbirds for Rex Fortescue a few months before. It's not so much the TV makers fault, but the novel itself, but it only adds to the incredulity of the actual story, which tries to have it's cake and eat it
Please don't think this is a bad mystery, by any means. It serves as an intriguing mystery, and is one of Agatha Christie's more well known novels. But this TV version only shows up the flaws of it's premise, and it really needed more personality in some of the performances to lift this story above the norm. As it is, it is a decent mystery, but not a great mystery.
