Learn to write like Benjamin Franklin

I was reading Talent is overrated by Geoff Colvin the other day and came across a snippet about how the great essayist Benjamin Franklin taught himself to be an extraordinary writer. He recognised that there were things he needed to improve to achieve his ambition, one of which was the range of his vocabulary. To build this he embarked on a programme of 'deliberate practice' in which he re-wrote essays by other people into verse, the metre and rhyme scheme of which demanded building a bank of synonyms for the original vocabulary.

I quite like the idea of using this as a method for expanding KS3 vocab - having to rewrite a section of a non-fiction text into nice regular ABAB quatrains each week, using a thesaurus to help.

Quick Quote: Barthes on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The reader will perhaps recall a novel by Agatha Christie in which all the invention consisted of concealing the murderer beneath the use of the first person of the narrative. The reader looked for him behind every 'he' in the plot: he was all the time hidden under the 'I.' Agatha Christie knew perfectly well that, in the novel, the 'I' is usually a spectator and that it is the 'he' who is the actor. 

Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero and Elements of Semiology, tr. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith [Boston: Beacon Press, 1970], pp. 34-5.

Bayard - Distraction and disguise in crime fiction

Aware that there is not much out there on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, I have been reading the book by Pierre Bayard, the French critic, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? with the intent of blogging about it to provide some resource. I have not finished yet – indeed I am yet to reach his actual dissection of the specific novel, but in his general justification for the approach of taking a novel where the solution has been given at the end, and then deciding that someone else actually did the murder, he makes some interesting points about detective fiction in general, which seem worth considering for Elements of Crime Writing, even if you are not reading TMoRA.

Distraction and disguise in crime fiction

Bayard is not in fact talking about false moustaches, but about more literary forms of disguise. He points out:

The advantage of distraction is that it highlights the aim of detective fiction, which makes it unique among literary forms: to prevent an idea from taking shape. Most literature tries to stimulate a certain idea or a certain group of images or sensations in the reader, but here we find ourselves in that original situation in which all the tension of the work is directed, through a detailed organization of invisibility, toward the prevention of thought. (Bayard, 2000, p. 25)

This is an interesting point in exploring crime writing – does it hold for all crime writing or only for those detective/ mystery novels which follow Van Dine’s rules about the solution being withheld to the end, but with enough clues that the reader could have solved it, or at least feels that they could have at the end? It is also interesting to debate the truth of the statement – surely to an extent anything with a ‘twist’ ending would fall into this category – or is that only part of what such a piece of fiction is doing? Is it attempting to provoke thought in its very twistiness?

The main items which I thought were of interest, however, were Bayard’s categorisation of the ways in which disguise and distraction can be achieved in relation to the identity of the murderer.  He exemplifies these and discusses them almost exclusively in reference to the works of Agatha Christie, but they are fruitful to explore in the light of other crime writing also.

1) the murderer’s ‘function’ in society: that is, certain professions seem to offer a degree of protection from suspicion. Bayard notes doctors, policemen, pharmacists and judges in this category.

2a) ‘literary function’, suggests Bayard, is an even better disguise. The murderer can be disguised as victim; either through being threatened with death or persecuted in some other way, or they can fake their own deaths.

2b) the other literary function which offers protection is that of investigator. Bayard points out this goes back to Oedipus Rex. ‘Since he is on the side of the law, the murderer reaps the natural benefits of a kind of presumption of innocence’ (Bayard, 2000, p. 23). This is a broad category including all those who help the investigator (so Dr Sheppard in TMoRA is included, and I think you could argue for Claudius in Hamlet also, if that is one of the texts you are studying).

N.B. In a later chapter Bayard mentions a third literary function that protects Sheppard: that of narrator. TMoRA is not unique in following this form (See this article from the Independent, but be warned, they do not all conceal their guilt ). The reader has to trust the narrator in a detective novel, and if they are unreliable narrators, that is usually concealed from the reader until the solution is unveiled. In the case of TMoRA, Dr Sheppard is doubly protected because not only is he the narrator (see post on Barthes) but also he is fulfilling the role we normally see Hastings in - dumb, reliable, innocent and 100% transparent Hastings - so we trust him by proxy. 

3) the final disguise which Bayard points out  is the traditional one, the alibi, the ‘disguise as absence’. There is an irony here as the usual intention behind the disguise as absence is often in order to return literally in disguise as someone else in order to commit the crime.

It might be worth considering in the context of Elements of Crime Writing whether these are distinctive characteristics of the detective genre or of crime writing, or somewhere in between - do murderers always conceal their involvement? Do writers always wish to conceal the truth from the reader? 

Reference:

Pierre Bayard Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? Published in French in 1998; published in English (trans. Carol Cosman) 2000, by the New Press (New York).