The Sweet Old Lady

As we’ve noted before, Miss Marple’s investigative patterns change when she’s far from home. Because she can’t rely on her personal connections to gather information, she leverages her social engineering skills a bit more. Specifically, in order to garner introductions to suspects, she relies heavily on Little Old Lady tropes of the time. In A Pocket Full of Rye, she befriends the house spinster, Miss Ramsbottom, to gain entry into the household. This version of Miss Marple leans on society’s assumptions about her, asking seemingly innocent questions about the recent crimes.

This changes the character’s “surface” – it takes a bit more critical thinking to understand how sharp Miss Marple truly is. Where earlier novels show her relying on the “village analogy monologue” to show off her logic, here she keeps her thought process internal. This is Miss Marple at her “suggest-iest”, giving the police hints and guiding questions rather than any outright answers. If not for her extended summation at the end, one imagines her detection would go entirely unnoticed.

This results in a different flavor of Miss Marple, and a different flavor of mystery. Prior entries in the series tried to be as fair as possible, with Miss Marple dropping hints left and right. But in this outing, with a more circumspect Miss Marple, we end up with something that looks a bit more like a lateral thinking puzzle. Christie scatters the clues and cues in the tiny details, rather in personal analogies. It’s not a physical puzzle – there’s plenty of psychology – but there’s less of the human expertise that featured in earlier works.

Miss Marple the Avenger

A Pocket Full of Rye also introduces Miss Marple in her rôle as the avenging angel (one which peaks in Nemesis). Prior stories involved Miss Marple either based on personal connection or intellectual interest. While she protested murder as evil and lamented its impacts on the innocent, her crime-solving was typically protective. She was always involved to protect others from the murderer – there was little sense of vengeance for the victims.

And then someone killed a personal connection – and a pitiful innocent at that. To add insult to injury, they did it in a conspicuously cruel way, to a literal orphan. And all of a sudden, we get to see a much more emotional side of our detective. This is the first case where Miss Marple knows a murder victim well, and she uses that knowledge. Her understanding of Gladys helps guide her instincts on where to place trust and how to interpret evidence, a Very Personal inside scoop.

Not only that, Miss Marple’s personal stakes completely change her approach to “success”. (Spoilers ahead!) Prior novels feature a Miss Marple totally focused on proof, so much so that she lays traps to bait the murderers. But in A Pocket Full of Rye, she’s simply focused on catching the killer, and entirely leaves the proof up to Inspector Neele. She encourages the Inspector:

“How do you think,” he asked reproachfully, “that I’m ever going to be able to prove all of this?”

Miss Marple nodded at him encouragingly, as an aunt might have encouraged a bright nephew going in for a scholarship exam.

“You’ll prove it,” she said. “You’re a very, very clever man, Inspector Neele. I’ve seen that from the first. Now you know who it is you ought to be able to get the evidence.”

Agatha Christie, A Pocket Full of Rye

You ought to be able to get the evidence – this from the woman who regularly goads and entraps murderers! But Miss Marple the Avenging Angel is happy to leave Justice to the police. It’s very Father Brown, and sets her up to solve a wider range of crimes, including cold cases. In this case, there’s a final missive from Gladys vindicating Miss Marple’s instincts – but the proof is the denouement, not the main event.

Memories of Gladys

Miss Marple’s sympathy for Gladys is particularly interesting when reflected against her lack of sympathy for the residents of Stonygates. In many ways, Gladys resembles those unfortunates – born into poverty, arguably tricked by circumstance into a life of drudgery at best and crime at worst. The major differences between the two seems to be agency – yet it’s clear that Lewis Serrocold believe in his wards as much as Miss Marple does in Gladys.

As a reader, it’s simply Miss Marple’s familiarity with Gladys that sets her apart from those prior inmates. Because we know Miss Marple to be an excellent judge of character, we trust her care for Gladys is not misplaced. It’s easy to assume Gladys simply fulfills a cruel part of the nursery rhyme theme – playing the part of the maid.

But there’s to Gladys more than meets the eye – and as a contemporary reader, I’m not sure how fair that is. We experience her once – in Inspector Neele’s interrogation of her – but mostly via the memories of others. Miss Marple, Miss Dove, and the Crumps all portray her differently. Miss Marple’s inspection of her room reveals even more clues. But because this novel features a quieter Miss Marple, we must draw our own conclusions from that scant evidence.

For me, this made Miss Marple’s revelations feel both more personal and a little bit less achievable. As a reader almost a century later and a sea away, I felt pretty unable to guess at Gladys’s personality. And because I’m not as tied in culturally to the practice of “training up” maids, their relationship wasn’t inherently sympathetic. The story landed emotionally – but I’d say it skirts very close to the boundaries of fair play.

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In A Pocket Full of Rye, Miss Marple embodies the idea of “you catch more flies with honey.” She’s dangerously sweet and interestingly manipulative, and she is Out for Vengeance. Some of the historical elements of the novel make it hard to relate to. It will be interesting to see how these are adapted in next week’s deep dive.

Until next week then – stay cozy, and stay curious!