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

Bayard, Pierre

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 156584579X ISBN 13: 9781565845794

Publisher: New Press, The, 2000

Synopsis

A French psychoanalyst and literary scholar offers a dramatic re-reading of Agatha Christie's classic novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, challenging Hercule Poirot's conclusions about the identity of the killer and presenting a startling new solution to the crime.

About this title

About the Author

Pierre Bayard is a psychoanalyst and Professor of French Literature in Paris.

Reviews

Agatha Christie's private detective Hercule Poirot and mystery devotees alike have presumed for three quarters of a century that Dr. James Sheppard, the narrator of the 1926 novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, is the only possible culprit in the title character's death. In this inquiry into the way readers perceive and writers construct the perfect mystery, Bayard, a French psychoanalyst, presents the possibility that Sheppard was wrongly accused. Examining this classic novel through a Freudian lens, Bayard discovers flaws in Poirot's deductive reasoning that led to the allegation, and shows how to find the real killer by learning how to see a certain way. That kind of seeing involves paying attention not only to the obscuring of information, but also to its omission, or "psychic blindness," a literary convention of which Christie was a master, according to Bayard. Employing his knowledge of psychoanalytic and literary theory, and the Van Dine principleAthe 20 rules of the detective mystery, established by S.S. Van Dine in the 1928 issue of the American MagazineABayard conducts a close reading of the novel to demonstrate how he came to consider Sheppard's innocence, and further suggests that we rethink the deaths of literary characters Madame Bovary and Bergotte, ask what happened to Les Liaisons dangereuses's Madame de Merteuil after her flight to Holland and contemplate who really unleashed the disaster in Emile Zola's Germinal. Bayard is an intuitive and passionate reader of the genre, and manages to build suspense while mounting his airtight argument against Sheppard as murderer and to finger the real killer. (June)
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Here's a charming little piece of literary detective work. Even though pretty much every mystery buff in the world knows that the villain in Christie's fourth novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), is the narrator, Dr. James Sheppard, Bayard asks us to consider that this assumption may not be true. His theory, a kind of alternative reading of the text, is fairly persuasive--many readers of the novel may have entertained similar suspicions--but the book's real value isn't as much in proving whodunit as it is in looking at the art of literary criticism in the context of the detective story. Bayard examines the concept of lying by omission (not actually telling an untruth but instead leaving out vital facts); the psychoanalytical basis of criticism; and the subtle use of various literary techniques throughout the Christie canon. It will make even the most devoted Christie fan look at some of her novels in a new light. A fascinating addition to the critical literature on the mystery genre. David Pitt
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Edition details

• Publisher: New Press, The
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 156584579X
• ISBN 13: 9781565845794
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176