In Lessons for a Perfect Detective Story one episode (called 'Nursery Rhyme Murder') evolves around murders following the lyrics of a television station's old nursery rhyme, which told the story of how ten little children died one by one.

In the Doctor Who serial Frontier in Space, Jo prevents her hypnosis by reciting nursery rhymes.

In Devon Monk's Magic to the Bone, Allie uses 'Miss Mary Mack' as her mantra.

Lampshaded in Five Little Pigs, in which Poirot is downright irritated that the list of suspects is reminding him of a nursery rhyme again.

In A Pocket Full of Rye, and more famously And Then There Were None, victims are murdered in the manner of a nursery rhyme.

Agatha Christie titled several novels after nursery rhymes.

In Diana Wynne Jones's Deep Secret, one of the Deep Secrets of the title is hidden in a nursery rhyme, and the hero has to interpret it in order to save the Love Interest's life.

Neil Gaiman's short story 'The Case of the Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds' humorously places Mother Goose characters in a parody of crime noir, as 'Little' Jack Horner, private eye, attempts to solve the murder of Humpty Dumpty.

One character jeers at the way ordinary people recite them to babies.

In Neil Gaiman's Stardust, nursery rhymes contain great secrets.

Taffy ap Cyrmu, in the same work, takes his name from one: 'Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief.' Wright's Chronicles of Chaos makes use of rhymes as enchantments. (Though his ambit includes Fairy Tales as well.)

Jack Spratt of Jasper Fforde's Nursery Crime books is himself a nursery rhyme figure and runs across several others.

His rendition of 'Hey, diddle diddle' is, in fact, a drinking song.

He attributed them to Bilbo and put one - from 'Hey diddle diddle' - in Frodo's mouth in the The Lord of the Rings. The idea is that these are the 'original' versions, and what we remember today are just vague fragments that don't make any sense on their own. Tolkien wrote several 'expanded' versions of nursery rhymes, filling in background to make them 'reasonable'. Resulting in her being quite Genre Savvy: she knows that the king has promised to send all his horses and men to help Humpty Dumpty, and she awaits the crow with great anticipation, to break up the fight.

In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Alice meets up with Humpty Dumpty himself and Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

Mother goose club nursery rhyme