Soon after ill-tempered, wealthy patriarch Rex Fortescue (Timothy West) has died in his office of a rare poison – and subsequently been found with rye in his pocket – his impossibly young and, shall we say, free-spirited widow Adele (Stacy Dorning) is likewise found dead, in the house’s drawing room and after having had tea, which uncharacteristically included a serving of honey. In Christie‘s mystery, it is the murderer himself who uses the nursery rhyme to play his ghastly game with the Fortescue family. Now wasn’t that a dainty dish to set before the king? When the pie was opened the birds began to sing.

Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye,įour and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. The nursery rhyme describes, in coded language, the modus operandi of a feared pirate known as Blackbeard, terror of the high seas between 17, who lured men into his services by promises of lavish pay and rations of rum (“sixpence” and “rye”), and often approached merchant ships under cover of friendly colors, only to have his concealed crewmen (“blackbirds in a pie”) emerge at the last moment and assault the other ship, which more often than not resulted in rich takings (“a dainty dish”) for Blackbeard (“the king”) and his men:

Seemingly innocuous, English nursery rhymes often have a rather sinister origin and noone knew this better than Agatha Christie, who repeatedly used them as a motif most famously probably in 1939’s And Then There Were None (a/k/a Ten Little Indians), where the murderer kills his victims, one by one, in the fashion of the Ten Little Indians ditty.Ī Pocket Full of Rye is one of three Christie mysteries inspired by Sing a Song of Sixpence the others are the short stories Four and Twenty Blackbirds and Sing a Song of Sixpence, contained in the collections Three Blind Mice and The Witness For the Prosecution, respectively.

A pocket full of rye joan hickson