The “old woman who lived in a shoe” ill-treats her offspring, as does the mother of Polly Flinders. Jack and Jill lose their footing, Miss Muffet flees a spider and—though the drowning cat is rescued by Tommy Stout— not “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” can help Humpty Dumpty.
Particularly unsavoury is the chilling account of three hapless creatures subjected to gratuitous violence. Agatha Christie used it to good effect in a 30-minute play she wrote in 1947, as BBC’s 80th birthday tribute to Queen Mary. Three Blind Mice later became The Mousetrap (the world’s longest-running stage production), with the rhyme staying central to the concept. Not only is it the killer’s trademark tune, but it is also symbolic of the situation— trapped victims stalked by a homicidal maniac.
A similar scenario— minus the blizzard— prevails in Ten Little Indians, an Agatha Christie novel also published as And Then There Were None. Both titles are borrowed from a ghoulish nursery rhyme that plays a major role in the proceedings. A group of people, marooned on an island, find themselves at the mercy of a murderer, who systematically eliminates them, in ways reminiscent of the bizarre lines in the rhyme. Thus, a person is hacked to death in a woodshed, in keeping with “One chopped himself in half/And then there were six,” while a hypodermic syringe turns “bumble bee” to further reduce the number of potential prey.
In A Pocketful of Rye, Christie adapts yet another popular nursery rhyme, with characteristic cunning. An industrialist named Rex (the “King was in his counting house...”) is found dead with grain in his pocket, while a murdered maid has a clothes peg on her nose. Blackbirds flit through the story, until Miss Marple discovers reason in the rhyme. One of Agatha Christie’s shorter works of fiction also takes its title from a phrase in Sing a Song of Sixpence, while ‘contrary’ Mary’s “silver bells and cockle shells” assume a sinister aspect in How Does Your Garden Grow?
The principal suspects in Five Little Pigs loosely conform to their porcine counterparts. Of those involved in a crime committed years earlier, “one went to market” (business again) and another “stayed at home”. Here, the parallels between poem and plot are by no means as clear-cut as they are in Ten Little Indians and A Pocketful of Rye. The link is weaker still in Hickory Dickory Dock, in which Hickory Road is merely the setting for a series of strange incidents.
Metaphorically significant is Crooked House— a title befitting the peculiar family of the woman the narrator wishes to marry. One, Two Buckle My Shoe, however, is literally about a shoe and a buckle— vital clues in a thrilling Poirot mystery.
Three, four shut the door? On anyone and anything, but not on Agatha Christie!
Suryakumari Dennison
