Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?: The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery

by Pierre Bayard

Book Overview

A psychoanalyst-cum-professor of literature offers an exciting exploration of Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the conventions of the mystery novel, and the act of reading itself. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 156584579X
• ISBN13: 9781565845794
• Release Date: June 2000
• Publisher: New Press
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.7" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Reasons to re-read Christie

This book is an exciting analysis and alternative reading of Agatha Christie's masterpiece, "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd". The aim of the book is not to "improve" on the original by giving a "better" solution. Rather it is to present this (and more generally, any) detective novel in a different light than we, as average readers, are used to and comfortable with. We like to be surprised by a neat unfolding of a solution that we are convinced by, but have not expected. And on this count Christie delivers more often than most writers of detective fiction, and with consummate skill. Bayard's book analyzes how this is accomplished, and then probes further to show that as readers, we have the right to interpret the text in different ways. He comes up with an alternative murderer, and who knows, perhaps Christie herself had built in this ambiguity into her story! Apart from a discussion of several stories by Christie, Bayard has an awful discussion about delusion (bringing the rating immediately down to 4 stars). But he makes up with an interesting description of Oedipus as a mystery story. Then, the book has several useful end notes, and many of the references are to be found only in French language journals. We, in the English speaking world, are fortunate to have a translation of this book. The bottom line: after reading Bayard's book, I rushed out to the nearest used book store and got myself a few mysteries by Agatha Christie, including "Roger Ackroyd". And I intend to re-reread these after a gap of over a decade.

A Worthy Analysis

First, a warning, Bayard's book contains long discussions of the methods used by Christie to hide the answer in many of her books. As such, it is best suited for Christie readers who have already read those works, or who do not mind having surprises revealed.Otherwise, Bayard provides a good analysis of how Christie fools her readers, pulling back the curtain to reveal the magician's secrets. His taxonimy of the tricks is useful, although incomplete. This makes it a good guide for an aspiring mystery writer looking to see how Christie worked her magic.Bayard's psychoanalysis of the crime is a bit more speculative. One can nit-pick his facts and conclusions, but the exercise is itself useful. Appling critical analysis to Christie's solution seems no less absurd than Tey's re-analysis of Richard III in Daughter of Time, the endless books on Jack the Ripper's identity, or decades of English literature classes convinced that the author is the last person to understand the significance of his own works.In sum, worth reading for those who enjoy learning about the tricks of the mystery writing trade.

Relax! Bayard affirms the greatness of Agatha Christie.

This book could never have been written by an Anglophone critic, who would treat the French reverence of Agatha Christie with the same bemused condescension as its apotheosis of Jerry Lewis (when Bayard lists the major writers who have discussed 'Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?' (Barthes, Eco, Robbe-Grillet, Perec et al), English-speaking writers are predictably absent). Coming from such an Anglophone culture as I do, it is startling to find Christie discussed not as a slick purveyor of narrow puzzles, but as a great writer of works of art, to be analysed with the same respect as Tolstoy and Flaubert. Bayard can make such claims because of his method - by focusing rigorously on the body of work, the texts and their techniques, and dismissing the irrelevant claims of biography, class, gender, history, context etc., he ironically opens them up, reveals their formal daring, their, their philosophical depth, their proto-post-modernist concern with the reader, the author and the stability of the text. In a comment on Durrenmatt's 'The Pledge' recently, I sarcastically referred to Christie as a modernist; after Bayard's book I stand disgraced.so although this book's novelty and selling point is the idea that Christie got it wrong, that the solution to her most ingenious and controversial novel doesn't make much sense, it is really a celebration of how Christie got it innovatively right for decades, an achievement that went unnoticed because, as a writer of puzzles, she didn't produce the kind of books that get reread, unlike those of Flaubert and Tolstoy. so Bayard's book is also a celebration of the detective genre, a theoretical analysis of its structures of meaning, showing how they actually undermine their ostensible purpose, the restoration of order and clarity (e.g. the narration of any detective story is always an instance of bad faith, constructing false worlds in order to trick the reader). The book is also a case for revivifying the waning practice of (specifically Freudian) psychoanalysis, especially in reading literary works - after all, the work of psychoanalysts and detectives, uncovering events in the past by an examination and interpretation of clues or signifcant events, are very similar (ditto literary critics). Most ambitiously, it is a book about the acts of writing and reading - in a performance of Barthesian magnanimity, Bayard shows how Christie destroys the structures and assumptions of conventional narration, thereby liberating the imaginative and interpretive powers of the reader willing to take up the challenge. In finding links between detective work, theory construction and clinical delusion, Bayard endearingly begins chasing his own tail, and the book will be invaluable to readers of Raymond Queneau. But, most pressingly, the book remains true to its promise - the self-sufficient theoretical analyses (largely readable, although I made heavy weather of the 'delusion' section) are firmly in the service of the book's myster

Entertaining re-assessment of the famous tale

Hercule Poirot concluded beyond a shadow of a doubt that Dr. James Sheppard killed Roger Ackroyd. Though many faulted Agatha Christie for allowing the narrator to also be the killer, for the next three-quarters of a century most readers fully agreed or simply accepted Poirot's evaluation of the famous homicide. However, Pierre Bayard believes that Sheppard has been wrongfully accused of a crime he did not commit. Using psychoanalysis, Bayard finds giant holes in Poirot's assessment of the murder. Bayard believes that Poirot failed to search for missing information and employs the Van Dine acceptable steps of 1920's detective tales to prove that Sheppard is the victim of a pompous sleuth rather than a killer. Pierre Bayard provides a unique perspective into the classic murder mystery that will leave readers spellbound and questioning many of our givens about the Christie tales. He makes a great argument that Poirot was wrong and Sheppard was innocent. Fans of Christie or any one who enjoys a thorough murder investigation will relish this well written, vacuum-sealed evaluation into who really killed Roger Ackroyd.Harriet Klausner