The secret of the gold mine
The secret of the gold mine , also The secret of the blackbirds , (original title A Pocket Full of Rye ) is the 45th detective novel by Agatha Christie . It was first published in October 1953 as a serialized novel in the Daily Express and then in book form in November 1953 by the Collins Crime Club and the following year in the United States with Dodd, Mead and Company . In 1956 Scherz Verlag published the German first edition in a translation by George Martin. In 2002 the novel was retransmitted by Milena Moser.
It determines Miss Marple in her sixth novel.
A Pocket Full of Rye - origin of the title
Christie liked to use nursery rhymes for her novel titles , such as for And then there was none more or for One, two, buckle my shoe (German title: The secret of buckle shoes ). The title of the novel A Pocket Full of Rye is a quote from the second verse of a very well-known Mother Goose song , namely Sing a Song of Sixpence .
- Sing a song of sixpence,
- A pocket full of rye.
- Four and twenty blackbirds,
- Baked in a pie.
- When the pie was opened,
- The birds began to sing;
- Wasn't that a dainty dish,
- To set before the king?
- The king was in his counting house,
- Counting out his money;
- The queen was in the parlor,
- Eating bread and honey.
- The maid was in the garden,
- Hanging out the clothes;
- When down came a blackbird
- And pecked off her nose.
This Nursery Rhyme Christie used three times for work titles: here, in the short story Sing a Song of Sixpence from 1932 and in the short story Four and twenty blackbirds . However, it not only gives the title, but also structures the plot (and the detection).
action
The novel is set in the early 1950s, so for its first readers in the present, in Baydon Heath, a fictional settlement in Surrey not far from London, where mainly rich people live.
The businessman Rex Fortescue dies in his London office from poisoning by taxine , the poison of the yew tree . One pocket of his jacket is filled with grains of rye. This puzzles the investigating inspector Neele. His main suspect is initially the victim's second, much younger wife, Adele Fortescue. But the following day she was poisoned with cyanide during high tea in the Fortescues' house in Baydon Heath, Yewtree Lodge ("Zur Yew") . In the evening, the housemaid Gladys Martin is found dead in the garden by the clothesline, strangled and with a clothespin on her nose.
Rex Fortescue has three children from his first wife Elvira: Percival Fortescue, his father's business partner, who lives in the house with his wife Jennifer; Lancelot Fortescue, who was rejected by his father after forging a check, has lived in Kenya since then and is married to Pat; Elaine Fortescue, who also lives at Yewtree Lodge . Both brothers are not in the house during the first murder: Percival on a business trip, Lancelot with Pat in Paris on the way from Africa to the family home because his father said he had called him home. Lancelot arrives at Yewtree Lodge just before the second murder.
Miss Marple, who learned of the murders from the press, arrives and offers to help the police and the family because she trained Gladys Martin to be a domestic servant. She noticed the numerous similarities between Sing a Song of Sixpence and the murders, not only the grains of rye in the bag, but also the name of the first victim (Rex = König = King), the death of Adele over tea with “bread and honey “(Bread and honey), the finding of the housemaid in the garden hanging up the laundry and finally the clothespin that reminds of the bird that“ bit off her nose ”. She draws the amazed Neele's attention to this with the “unforgettable line”: “Have you gone into the question of blackbirds?” (Did you investigate the question of the blackbirds?).
To Neele's surprise, it turns out that there had actually been two incidents with blackbirds in the house a few months earlier: In the pie , the meat had been removed from the filling and replaced with dead blackbirds, and on Rex Fortescue's desk there were also blackbirds shot by the gardener . In addition, Lancelot mentions the “Blackbird mine”, a gold mine in Africa, about which there was a dispute a long time ago. Fortescue owned the mine together with his partner MacKenzie, while Fortescue is said to have left his feverish partner to die during the exploration. MacKenzie's wife had urged her young children to take revenge on Rex Fortescue.
Through conversations with the residents, deductions, and looking through Gladys Martin's legacy, Miss Marple solves the riddle: the echoes of the Mother Goose Rhyme only served to confuse. The murderer had recognized from the incidents with the blackbirds that a MacKenzie child lived in the household and thus tried to divert suspicion from himself. Lancelot Fortescue had used Gladys Martin as his tool to commit the murder of Rex Fortescue while he was away from the country. Miss Marple and Inspector Neele suspect the motive that he wants to get the Blackbird Mine into his possession. A newspaper report about uranium discoveries in Tanganyika gives Neele reason to speculate that this took place on the site of the mine.
Miss Marple suspects the MacKenzie child in Jennifer Fortescue, which Inspector Neele can verify. The conviction of the perpetrator no longer takes place in the novel, but in the last chapter Miss Marple finds a letter from Gladys after her return home, which proves that she was right.
Literary allusions
The names of the children of Rex Fortescue all come from the legends of King Arthur : Percival, Lancelot and Elaine. The unusual choice of names of the children, which the investigating inspector Neele also notices, is motivated by the reading and the romantic inclinations of their mother Elvira. Lancelot Fortescue reports that his mother read to him as a child from Tennyson's Idylls of the King : "She wore lots of clinking things and lay on a sofa and used to read me stories about knights and ladies that bored me stiff." She wore tons of clunkers and lay on the sofa and always read to me stories of knights and ladies who have mortally bored me.) This is a cycle of poems that has the Arthurian circle as its subject.
people
- Miss Marple, the amateur detective
- Inspector Neele, the investigating officer from Scotland Yard
- Rex Fortescue, a businessman
- Adele Fortescue, his second wife
- Percival Fortescue, son of Rex Fortescue
- Jennifer Fortescue, his wife, formerly a nurse
- Lancelot Fortescue, son of Rex Fortescue
- Patricia (Pat) Fortescue, his wife
- Elaine Fortescue, daughter of Rex Fortescue
- Gerald Wright, her fiancé
- Vivian Dubois, lover of Adele Fortescue
- Miss Ramsbottom, sister-in-law of Rex Fortescue, sister of his first wife Elvira, the mother of their children
- Mary Dove, housekeeper in the house "Zur Eibe"
- Gladys Martin, maid in the house "Zur Eibe"
- Mr. Crumb, butler at the "Zur Eibe" house
- Mrs. Crumb, his wife, cook in the house "Zur Eibe"
- Ellen Curtis, domestic help in the house "Zur Eibe"
- Irene Grosvenor, Rex Fortescue's Personal Secretary at Consolidated Investments Trust until his death
- Miss Somers, typist at Consolidated Investments Trust
- Miss Griffith, office manager at Consolidated Investments Trust
- Mrs. Hardcastle, Personal Secretary of Percival Fortescue at Consolidated Investments Trust after the death of his father
- Professor Bernsdorff, doctor at St. Jude's Hospital
- Sergeant Hay
- Constable Waite
- Commissioner, Inspector Neele's superior
- Mr. Billingsley, one of Rex Fortescue's attorneys
- Helen MacKenzie, widow of a former Rex Fortescue partner
- Donald and Ruby MacKenzie, their children
Film adaptations
Taina Tschornych Drozdow (1983)
The first film adaptation of the novel is the Soviet feature film Тайна "Чёрных дроздов" ( Taina tschornych drosdow ) from 1983. The literal translation of the title means The Secret of the Black Thrush . Miss Marple is played by Estonian actress Ita Ever .
Miss Marple (TV series)
The novel was remade for the BBC Miss Marple television series and aired for the first time on March 7, 1985. Joan Hickson plays the role of Miss Marple .
Agatha Christie's Miss Marple
For the fourth season of the British television series Agatha Christie's Marple , a film was made with Julia McKenzie as Miss Marple. It was first broadcast on September 6, 2009.
Major expenses
- 1953 Collins Crime Club (London), November 9, 1953
- 1954 Dodd Mead and Company (New York)
- 1956 German first edition. Only authorized translation from English by George S. Martin: Scherz Verlag (Bern)
- 2002 German new edition. Translated from the English by Milena Moser. Scherz Verlag (Bern, Munich, Vienna)
Audio books
- 2004 The Secret of the Goldmine (5 CDs): unabridged reading. Speaker: Gabriele Blum. Director: Hans Eckardt. Translation by Milena Moser. Publishing house and studio for audio book productions (Marburg / Lahn)
Web links
- A Pocket Full of Rye on the official Agatha Christie website
- Tayna chyornykh drozdov (Russian: 1983) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- A Pocket Full of Rye (1985) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Marple: A Pocket Full of Rye (2008) in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ John Curran: Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks. Harper Collins, 2009, p. 148.
- ↑ Chris Peers, Ralph Spurrier and Jamie Sturgeon. Collins Crime Club - A checklist of First Editions . Dragonby Press (Second Edition) March 1999 (Page 15)
- ↑ John Cooper and BA Pyke. Detective Fiction - the collector's guide : Second Edition (Pages 82 and 87) Scholar Press. 1994. ISBN 0-85967-991-8
- ↑ American Tribute to Agatha Christie
- ↑ a b German first edition in the catalog of the German National Library
- ↑ a b New translation in the catalog of the German National Library
- ^ I. Opie and P. Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edn., 1997), pp. 394-5. Rough translation: Sing a song for sixpence , / a bag full of rye, / twenty-four blackbirds / are baked in a pie. / When the pie was opened, / the blackbirds began to sing; / Wasn't that a delicate dish / to serve the king? / The king was in his office / counting his money / the queen was in the drawing room / eating bread and honey. / The girl was in the garden / hanging up laundry / a blackbird came down / and pecked off her nose.
- ^ Dennis Sanders: The Agatha Christie Companion, Berkley Books, New York 1989, p. 257.
- ↑ Audiobook (complete) in the catalog of the German National Library