Edmund Wilson, the famous
literary critic, once inquired disdainfully (in an essay explaining his inability
to develop the mystery-reading habit), "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?"
In a single sentence, with its reference to the notorious plot of Agatha
Christie's sixth novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, he struck deep
at the collective spirit of a community of like-minded souls: the detective
fiction readers of the world. Ever since 1926, when the novel in question
was first published, helping to insure its author's reputation as the ruling
queen of crafty crime, mystery fans have indeed cared. Passionately.
But until the arrival of
this provocative rereading of the case, written by a psychoanalyst and translated
from the French, it is likely that not one of them ever doubted the validity
of the solution as worked out by the redoubtable Hercule Poirot. After all,
if the author's own detective had incorrectly followed the clues laid down
for him, what kind of unsteady ground was the reader left standing on?
Although Bayard makes it
clear that those picking up his book don't necessarily have to return to
the original text - he does give a very concise summary of the principal
characters and actions of Christie's story - it is an exercise, really a
pleasure, that I urge you toward. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is such
a landmark of the genre that it is not just a bit of nostalgia, a form of
genial time travel, but also a reminder of what the Golden Age of the mystery
novel was all about: the matching of wits between writer and reader, with
puzzles that truly puzzled and were made all the more satisfying by the operative
credo of fair play.
To address the actual plot
of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is to risk spoiling the fun. Let's
just say there is an English village, King's Abbott, in which a bluff country
squire, the much-mentioned Ackroyd, resides until his untimely death, [stabbed]
by an unknown assailant. Unfortunately for the murderer - or so one used
to think, pre-Pierre Bayard - there is also in the village a retired Belgian
police inspector, the unparalleled M. Hercule Poirot. Poirot's celebrated
"little grey cells," those he uses to form his theories of a case, steadily
power the investigation to its startling conclusion, one that has always
been as magnificent for its shock value as for its apparently irrefutable
logic. That Professor Bayard's delicate probing of the book's structure manages
to turn it convincingly in a fresh direction, toward an actual murderer never
even suspected, is a triumph of scholarship that is at once playful and
serious.
How we approach classic
texts should never be as static an experience as we generally allow it to
be, a truth proved anew by Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? It now joins
a list of other similarly clever literary treats, among which I include Rex
Stout's "Watson Was a Woman" and Frederick Crews's The Pooh Perplex.