A Pocket Full of Rye

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.