Little Niggers In Agatha Christie's A Pocket Full Of Rye

Introduction: Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye, Four and twenty blackbirds baked in pie. When the pie was opened the birds began to sing. Wasn’t a dainty dish to set before the king?

The king was in his counting house, counting his money,
The queen was in the parlour eating bread and honey,
The maid was in the garden hanging out the clothes,
When there came a little dickey bird and nipped off her nose. (Christie 113)

Nursery rhyme is the essence of Dame Agatha Christie’s A Pocket Full of Rye. It was apparently obvious that her rhymed detective novel reflected her fascination for the musical harmony of poetic crime. “ Agatha Christie also acquired a reputation as the team’s chronicler of events in verses which became

In today’s violent world, it appears to be thought by many to be more reprehensible to refer to niggers, yids, wops, wogs, poms, proofs, dagos, japs, dykes and so on, than to murder representatives of such categories of people, ‘Nigger’, an English or Irish dialect pronunciation of ‘negro’ is no longer acceptable; … (169) Also, she has been reprimanding for her anti-Semitism and hostility for Catholics. “Christie was also pilloried, by the Anti-Defamation League among others, for anti-Semitism in her novels, sadly not uncommon in the works of that time. She was also criticized for disparaging remarks about Catholics, also there didn’t seem to be any…”(Cawthorne 34). Nevertheless, Agatha Christie’s works outsold all of the most famous detective authors’ bestsellers, and no one had ever surpassed Christie’s productivity. However, to the exclusion of “…only Shakespeare and the Bible have outsold her…”(Sova 8). She is the prominent figure of crime fiction genre for all ages. Nothing in Christie’s life would obstruct her from writing her innovative novels that have been astonishing publicity for decades. Edwards declares that” Neither travel nor romance slowed Christie’s productivity as a writer. Like so many of her colleagues in the Detection Club, she was a workaholic. The quality of what she wrote was mixed, but that was inevitable, partly because she was so prolific, but also because she was never afraid to take a risk and try something new”