57 pages • 1 hour read
Agatha ChristieA Pocket Full of Rye
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1953A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Cultural Context: The 1950s and the Detective Novel
Though she lived until 1976, Agatha Christie is strongly associated with the “golden age” of the detective novel, the 1930s and 1940s. Christie and her golden-age contemporaries Ngaio Marsh, Margery Ailingham, and Josephine Tey continued writing into the postwar period, though Tey died in 1952. Dorothy Sayers, another golden-age author, produced her final Lord Peter Wimsey novel in 1937.
A Pocket Full of Rye is set in the world that Christie and her fellow “queens of crime” created: one in which crime itself is an object of fascination. At the same time, aspects of the setting and plot are self-consciously aware of England’s postwar transformations and the war as a source of trauma. Neele recalls growing up on a grand estate as the son of servants and notes that such estates are now likely to be part of the National Trust. This shift reflects the economic decline of the British nobility in the early 20th century, as many families donated their properties to the National Trust due to the onerous tax burdens attached to their inheritances. Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, takes place on just such an estate during World War I, depicting tensions within an aristocratic family and the increasing cost of estate maintenance.
The setting of A Pocket Full of Rye telegraphs these shifts, as the Fortescues essentially live in a suburb of London, surrounded by other families whose wealth is not necessarily attached to title or aristocratic heritage. As the secretaries debate how to help the dying Rex Fortescue, the third-person narrator interjects, “[F]or citizens of a country that enjoyed the benefits of Medical Service for All, a group of quite reasonably intelligent women showed incredible ignorance of correct procedure” (5). This reminder of the establishment of the National Health Service anchors the novel in the postwar period and reflects the overall expansion of social programs in the UK. The Fortescues refuse to give up luxuries by following rationing laws, which were in place until 1954. Pat is a war widow in her first marriage, and her distant ties to the aristocracy are still a sign of prestige to the arriviste Rex. Class remains deeply significant in this novel, even as its manifestations have shifted from those of the early Christie oeuvre.
Literary Context: Christie and the Miss Marple Novels
The overwhelming majority of Christie’s work centers around either the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot or, to a lesser degree, Miss Jane Marple. Miss Marple, unlike Poirot, is an Englishwoman of fairly distinguished though uncertain background. If Poirot is sometimes distrusted as a foreigner, then Miss Marple’s nationality, age, and gender allow her to quickly establish trust with relative strangers, though she does encounter some skepticism from law enforcement.
Several of the Marple novels take place within her home village of St. Mary Mead. In The Body in the Library, Miss Marple is particularly motivated to solve the crime because the victim was found in the home of her dear friends. In other novels, such as A Caribbean Mystery, Miss Marple investigates crime while on vacation, either at the behest of friends or out of her own natural curiosity. The novel 4:50 From Paddington features another energetic and enterprising housekeeper, a less suspect version of Miss Dove, who acts as Miss Marple’s assistant to infiltrate an estate where she suspects that a body has been hidden. In that work, as in A Pocket Full of Rye, Miss Marple is sympathetic to the woman fooled by the murderer, who killed for her sake. In Nemesis, Miss Marple is explicitly charged with enacting justice on behalf of a friend’s wrongfully imprisoned son. This role is in line with Neele’s characterization of her as an “avenging fury” in A Pocket Full of Rye. Throughout the works that feature her, Miss Marple’s morality and care for those she encounters lead her to unmask killers and prevent them from enjoying personal gain from the suffering that they cause.
Related Titles
By Agatha Christie
