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Exploring Agatha Christie's Art of Deception and Digression

© Pamela St. Clair

If, like me, you’re a fan of British mysteries, you developed an appetite for them after biting into one written by the queen of them all, Agatha Christie. I will be forever grateful to my father who introduced me to Christie when I was a pre-pubescent saddened to have completed the entire Nancy Drew series. Although I have since moved on to more sophisticated and timely authors, Christie remains a favorite for her sly and ever surprising plot twists and turns and for her “murders of manners” (my own term) that exclude the sordid and ugly "real" crimes of everyday life. She is pure escapism—the Sherlock Holmes type, not the Mary Higgins Clark type—for her mysteries are replete with complexities and insightful analyses of human nature. When you’re cocky enough to think that you have figured out the Christie formula, you’re apt to become quickly humbled when you find yourself screeching to an abrupt halt at the dead end toward which you have been steered. The Hercule Poirot novels are my favorite. I’m equally infatuated with Ms. Marple, but sometimes the circumscribed world of St. Mary Mead begins to wear thin after a while. My least favorite are the early Tommy and Tupence adventures, but I digress.

As do all talented detective fiction writers, Christie generously provides clues and half-truths as her story unfolds, yet in the end you marvel, “Now why didn’t I see that?” And, if you’re as naive as I am, you assume that the detective’s solution is THE solution. You accept, with complete trust and loyalty, Hercule’s or Ms. Marple’s brilliant deductions and dazzling resolutions. Pierre Bayard’s Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? is a fascinating literary analysis of Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Bayard helps you to discern why you simply didn't see this or that, and although it combines close readings and psychoanalysis, Bayard's critique is not a dry academic discourse (except for section three, a discussion of delusion and theory and delusion and criticism, which if you choose to skip it, will not alter your appreciation or understanding of Bayard’s eloquent treatise). Far from the often arid landscape of traditional literary criticism, this work is an engaging, accessible, and convincing argument for an alternate solution to the one Poirot, the esteemed Belgium with the precise mustache, posits. And, not only is it an argument, but it’s a disguised mystery in and of itself, but I digress, and I’ll get to that later.