A Pocket Full of Rye

Miss Marple is the work’s other investigative protagonist and a recurring character throughout Christie’s oeuvre. A spinster and lifelong resident of the village of St. Mary Mead, Miss Marple is keenly observant and draws on her lifetime of experience with human nature to guide her investigations. She is frequently described as outwardly harmless and unassuming, as her age and gender lead those around her to treat her almost as part of the background. From the butler’s perspective, Miss Marple appears as a “tall, elderly lady wearing an old-fashioned tweed coat and skirt, a couple of scarves and a small felt hat with a bird’s wing” (106), and he immediately recognizes her as someone to be treated with respect. Neele has a similar reaction, deciding that Miss Marple’s age and background will make her a natural confidant for servants and family members. He is soon proven right, as Miss Ramsbottom invites Miss Marple to stay and enlists her in a robust discussion of mission work.

Miss Marple’s other contributions to the case are equally immediate, as she tells Neele that Gladys would not have known how to make sense of whatever she discovered about the killer and points out the nursery rhyme motif. In many scenes, Miss Marple is depicted as knitting as she extracts confidences from the women of the household, underscoring that her outlook on the case, influenced by her gender, brings the solution together. Miss Ramsbottom, more than Neele, trusted Miss Marple to solve the mystery, telling her that she bears her no ill will for exposing Lance and in fact expected her to succeed. Solidarity and trust between women prove key to the final resolution: Gladys herself wrote to Miss Marple before her death, describing “Albert Evans” and enclosing his photograph, thus providing all the evidence Neele will need to convict Lance. Miss Marple thus embodies Gender, Intuition, and Justice and illustrates the dangers of underestimating women’s ability to solve crime.

Rex, the head of the Fortescue family, was widely despised before his death and generally regarded as an unscrupulous businessman who barely avoided legal consequences for his professional conduct. He married a much younger woman, presumably to flatter his vanity, as it is revealed that she had an affair with her golf instructor and would have left him all of her money. Neale almost gleefully points out to his sergeant hat despite the air of respectability in the Fortescue firm, the family name was changed to hide his Central European origins, and “he’s had certain connections with the black market and put through one or two deals that are questionable to say the least of it” (24). The reference to the black market adds to the postwar setting—Rex skirted wartime rationing laws and other economic restrictions for his own ends. Rex is one of the novel’s examples of Class, Ambition, and Transgression, as everyone around him acknowledges that he had no scruples in the pursuit of wealth. Lance’s open admiration of his father is thus a clue that the two share a vision of the world, where morality is secondary to skirting rules as needed.

His sister-in-law, Miss Ramsbottom, tells Neele to look into his past, which leads him to the discovery that on one of Rex’s trips to Africa, his business partner, Mackenzie, died under unclear circumstances while investigating the Blackbird Mine for gold. His widow suspected Rex of murdering him and swore that she and her children would see him die for it. Neele finds this a motive in the case, as the murders all reference “Sing a Song of Sixpence” and there were pranks involving dead blackbirds before the murders. Neele discovers that Rex was likely suffering from advanced dementia as a result of syphilis, which compromised his business judgment and endangered the company’s solvency. This associates him further with moral decay, given the intense stigma around sexually transmitted infections in Christie’s time, even though syphilis was increasingly curable by the 1950s. Rex’s unhappy and greedy family reflects his own temperament as patriarch. Lance’s decision to murder him to save the company and his own future is the culmination of his own dark ambitions. He dies largely un-mourned, as does his mercenary wife, underlining that family bonds are not necessarily supported by material ambition.

The younger Fortescue son, Lance, has long been estranged from his father and siblings. His return from Kenya is thus an utter shock to his family, though he claims that his father planned his return months before during a secret visit to England that only Adele knew about. Lance is first introduced as a devoted husband, telling his new wife, Pat, all about his family as they prepare to return to Yewtree Lodge. He speaks about all of them in cynical terms, slightly alarming Pat. Lance is bitter toward his older brother and routinely antagonizes him, urging their younger sister to spend her inheritance no matter the risk to the business, mostly for the sake of angering his brother. He portrays his brother as grasping and scheming, insisting that he came home not because he had any concerns for Rex’s health but only to “see fair play” (210). He dramatically declaims that he suspects a Mackenzie family member is in the house and will go to Africa not only to escape the rest of his family but also to save them from further vengeance schemes.

With Pat, Lance is a devoted husband; with Percival, he is an impulsive schemer. With women, he is intentionally charming, smiling at all the secretaries at the family firm and even attempting cheer Miss Ramsbottom. These many faces help obscure his greatest ambition: to take over the Blackbird mine, now worth a fortune due to uranium deposits. Lance, even more than his father, underscores masculine power—he evades suspicion because he is an outwardly personable man, and only Miss Marple detects the venal motives beneath.

Pat is warm, sociable, and interested in people, in contrast to cynical, manipulative Lance. She is immediately drawn to Miss Marple’s concern for Gladys, and Miss Marple likes her in turn: “Miss Marple had met many Pats and knew them well. She felt at home with this rather unhappy looking girl” (107). Pat, tellingly, dislikes almost everything about Yewtree Lodge, as if recognizing the relationship between the house and its inhabitants.

Her unhappy and brief prior marriages, one that ended in her husband’s suicide due to scandal and one that ended in her husband’s tragic combat death in the war, have left her with a fear that she herself is somehow to blame. Miss Marple does her best to reassure Pat that she is safe and that the killer has a purpose that does not include her, but Pat is not truly reassured. Miss Marple spares her feelings by not telling her the truth about Lance but urges her to return to where she has been happiest should she encounter more adversity. Pat is key to the themes of Class, Ambition, and Transgression and Family, Loyalty, and the Ties That Bind. She knows little of the Fortescue family history or who Lance really is and suffers for this lack of knowledge more than the other characters, even as she is the ostensible reason for his ruthless ambition.

Percival, Rex Fortescue’s oldest son and a partner in the firm, is obsessed with order and sound financial management. Even the police assigned to the case find him somewhat unlikeable, as the assistant commissioner dubs him “Percy Prim.” He sees his father’s death as inconvenience more than a personal loss, declaring, “It will all be most unpleasant. To think that such a thing should happen to us” (73).

Percival is logical but not socially adept—he ignores his wife’s attempts to defend him from his family’s criticisms and is easily angered by Lance’s efforts to bait him. More fundamentally, he never suspects that his wife, Jennifer, is actually Ruby Mackenzie, who married him partly out of revenge for her dead father. His ambition is far less deadly than Lance’s, but it still cuts him off from his core humanity and relationships with others.

A former nurse, Jennifer is looked down upon by her husband’s family for her relatively humble origins. She spends much of her free time shopping and seems almost energized by the murders for introducing variety into her life. Her interest soon gives way to fear as the case takes Neele into the history of the Mackenzie family and the Blackbird Mine. Jennifer is really Mackenzie’s lost daughter, who married Percival as a kind of fulfillment to her mother’s revenge scheme.

Miss Marple feels sorry for her, comparing her to a bank manager’s wife from her home village whose ambiguous class position prevented her from forming friendships. Jennifer’s loneliness leads her to confide in Miss Marple that she regrets her marriage. She readily confesses her real identity and dislike for Rex. While she rejects her mother’s plans for violent vengeance, Jennifer reflects the theme of Family, Loyalty, and the Ties That Bind, as her loyalty to her own parents explains much of her behavior.

As the Fortescue family’s organized housekeeper, Miss Dove is young, efficient, and cynical. Neele is both drawn to her and mistrustful of her from the first, suspecting that her matronly exterior conceals deeper motives. She cheerfully confides all the family’s secrets and her dislike of them. Neele initially suspects her of being Ruby Mackenzie, but she refuses to confess, telling him slyly, “[T]here are a lot of possibilities, aren’t there” (223).

She later grudgingly admits to blackmailing Jennifer Fortescue to keep her identity a secret, and Neele learns more about her: After she leaves a house, it is often burgled, suggesting that she uses her insider knowledge to orchestrate the burglaries. Miss Dove, like Lance, is outwardly charming but secretly driven by greed.

A young parlor maid at Yewtree Lodge, Gladys grew up in St. Mary Meade’s orphanage. Miss Marple trained her as a servant, but she soon left the small village in search of a more adventurous life. Gladys is not conventionally attractive and is very gullible, so when she is murdered, Miss Marple suspects that an unscrupulous man might have taken advantage of her. Miss Marple is outraged by her murder, especially the choice to “affront human dignity” by putting a clothespin on her nose (109).

Lance exploits Gladys’s class position and desire for love to his advantage, using her as a tool to secure his future. Her death serves as a testament to his callousness, as does his choice to make her last days ones of terror when she realizes that she inadvertently murdered Rex. Her own letter to Miss Marple about this will prove Lance’s undoing, underlining that her capacity for care was greater than his, despite her lower-class status, and this leaves her with the ultimate advantage after her death.