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Exploring Agatha Christie's Art of Deception and Digression - Page 2

© Pamela St. Clair

As a Christie fan, or a mystery fan in general, you will forever thank yourself for reading Bayard’s witty and intelligent study of Christie’s tactics and those of other mystery writers, for Bayard offers insight into how mysteries more or less universally function, dating as far back as Sophocles' Oedipus. His unraveling of the mystery of mysteries is akin to a behind the scenes dissection of a magician’s allusions. You will continue to be surprised by mysteries, but you will never read one in the same manner. Also, you’ll find yourself curling up again with your favorite Christie mystery, and it will be an entirely new (or novel (!) ) experience.

It’s more or less expected, of course, that you have read Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It also helps, but is not essential, if you are familiar with Endless Night and Curtain. Assuming that it may have been a while, or a long while in my case, since you’ve read the novel, Bayard begins with a helpful and brief plot and character summary. If you remember, a unique facet of the Ackroyd mystery is that it’s narrated by the killer Poirot fingers, Dr. Sheppard, yet this bit of information is concealed from the reader. And as Bayard summarizes Christie’s novel, he questions the concept of a reader’s blindness, or the way in which a reader interprets and acts to produce meaning in a text. (Classic reader response theory. I know I said it’s not highly academic, and it’s not, trust me. You won’t be distracted.) How, Bayard asks, does each reader assimilate the clues presented?

Since Christie cleverly integrates double-edged discourse, or word play, throughout her works (and this was the news that most intrigued me and that is sending me back to those favorites to re-read, but I digress), the potential exists for a variety of readings, different for each reader. This double-edged discourse also functions significantly in Bayard’s refutation of Dr. Sheppard as murderer. Gaps in the text compound the word play. Poirot fills the gaps in one way, but Bayard convincingly fills them in another way (and the reader may fill them in yet another way).

Bayard discloses his theory, hint by hint and clue by clue, much like Dr. Sheppard unfolds his narrative. After a summary of the novel, Bayard discusses the Van Dine principle (set forth by S. S. Van Dine, pseudonym for the American writer Williard H. Wright and published in 1928; hence, Christie may have been well acquainted with the principle), which details twenty universal rules of detection fiction. The two most important ones, according to Bayard, are that the truth must be hidden throughout the book until the end and that although it’s hidden, it must be accessible, often in plain view, to the reader. As Bayard explains, whereas most literature concerns the stimulation of ideas, the detective novel organizes its information to prevent thought (25). To this end, there are various standard disguises in a mystery novel. The murderer may be disguised, for example, by his or her nature, function, or association with the investigators. In general, we assume that the murderer is disguised behind some unknown “he” but in this Christie novel, where Sheppard is both narrator and, possibly, murderer, the “he is really hidden behind the ‘I’”(33).

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