A Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie

 

A Pocket Full of Rye by Agatha Christie

published 1953

 

 

 

I have blogged on this book before – but that was to ask a specific question which has been bothering me for a long time and still has not been resolved: see the post here. (In a book on Christie, Charles Osborne claimed there was an early clue to the murderer in this one, and I wanted to know what it was.)

Then again, I have floated the idea that characters called Gladys don’t do well in Christie – this book is Exhibit A.

And I like to write about stockings in books, and particularly Chistie – it was a key feature of my Agatha Christie Festival talk last year:

By 1952 we have the very rich, very well-dressed American Ruth Van Rydock in They Do it With Mirrors -  10 years before she would certainly have been in silk stockings, but now is wearing ‘fine nylons’.

And so is Gladys, a miserable maid in the 1953 Pocketful of Rye. She is one of the few characters in Christie to be strangled by a stocking. She is bringing in the washing, but there is a clue in the fact that it is not her afternoon out, but she had put on her best nylons - so, we should surmise, she must have been meeting someone out by the washing-line.

And, this is from my post on The ABC Murders:

Stockings feature in the book – always a favourite of mine: see this Guadian article for my Theory of Stockings which has now been quoted elsewhere (thank you blogfriend Susanna Tayler for finding it on the  website of the Otago Museum in Dunedin NZ)

And in the opening pages of the book, Mr Fortescue’s secretary is described thus:

She wore an expensively cut little black suit and her shapely legs were encased in the very best and most expensive black-market nylons.

-   Even the constable called to the scene notices ‘super nylons’’

 

(Please imagine her without the hat for the working day…) Clover Vintage 

She would have fitted in well in my recent post on Secretaries in Books.

The office scenes are nicely done, but focus soon moves to the House of Doom: Yew Tree Lodge in the Home Counties, near to three excellent golf courses. 

The house is lavishly decorated and kept up, and full of family members who hate each other and are busy snubbing each other and wishing they were richer, even though they all live lives of great comfort and luxury.                    

There is a housekeeper ready to spill the goss, and yet again Christie tells us that domestic work is well-paid and wonderful:

This is the perfect racket. People will pay anything—anything—to be spared domestic worries.

I turned my cold Bolshy eye on this trope in an entry on 4.50 From Paddington.

There is an ancient aunt tucked away upstairs, and it’s not clear what her role is, she seems to add nothing to the plot, but she earns her place with this splendid quote about Miss Marple:

‘She’s frivolous, like all Church of England people, but she knows how to run a charity in a sensible way.’

(This reminded me of Patricia Wentworth’s detective: ‘Her name is Maud Silver…she has solved many difficult cases besides being an extremely expert knitter.’)

Miss Marple arrives in the book quite late, determined to find out what really happened to Gladys, and busy telling us ‘one has to be very suspicious. The great thing to avoid is having in any way a trustful mind.’

So plenty of peripheral considerations here. The big issue for me with the book is that, even for Christie, the murder plot is ludicrous beyond belief, it boggles the mind, it is outrageous. In my earlier post I said this:

SPOILER, but only if you are in the middle of reading it or about to start:

 

Is the murderer’s plan the most ridiculous ever? It involves them in the most elaborate time-consuming plan. One can understand a villain buttering up an existing member of staff, but what’s involved in this one is completely nonsensical. A YEAR beforehand to go on holiday in a fake persona, find a random person, persuade them to go and work at the house concerned, and then go ahead with the poison plot. It’s just not convincing.

So many things that could and surely would have gone wrong?  And all kinds of unanswered questions about availability, about sitting down and making this plan, about choosing an accomplice.

There also seems to me to be a mismatch with the character of the murderer throughout, and the plot.

END SPOILER

But on the plus side, I love the depiction of the huge but ugly and claustrophobic house, the tea in the drawing room.

The snobbish remarks: one character is criticized for saying ‘postage stamp’ – to be U rather than non-U it should be just ‘stamp’, according to Nancy Mitford (though later than this book - Christie knew what she was talking about & was ahead of the game), the feeling of being cooped up with relatives, unable to get away. The telephone is ringing in the distance, the door to the grounds is unlocked, the tray of cakes put down on the chest in the hall, ready to be brought in. It is November, the fire is blazing, it’s getting dark. The cook is in the kitchen making dinner and complaining about her husband. I think it is one of the great setups and a brilliant evocation of atmosphere. It's got everything a 1950s crime book should  have.

Two women in suits, clover vintage

Two women having tea clover vintage