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). 

Tobin's 'Narrative Rug Pull' and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Vera Tobin, in an article called 'Cognitive bias and the poetics of surprise' explores the role that 'cursed knowledge' plays in the way we experience narrative surprises. 'Cursed knowledge' refers to the fact, well established by experimental psychology, that humans cannot help but conflate their own knowledge with that of others - ie we tend to think that because we know something, other people do to. The classic experiment to show this is Elizabeth Newton's tapping experiment. When someone is asked to tap the rhythm of a well-known song and then estimate how likely it is that a listener will be able to identify the song, they massively overestimate the chances. Tappers put the expected success rate at about 50% - in fact it's only 3%. This applies to fiction too - we can forget that privileged knowledge that we have as readers is not available to the characters, which creates a surprise when they act apparently irrationally; but we can also forget that they may have information which we do not, particularly when they are apparently telling us everything.

The satisfying twist, argues Tobin, rests on this.

An entirely unpredictable narrative element frequently qualifies not as a satisfying twist, but as an unsatisfying non sequitur. A narrative that would avoid this pitfall must include some elements early on that are endowed with some significance that will only be visible later. However, this significance must, in retrospect at least, seem to have been available from the start, or, when the reader looks back, she or he will not be satisfied. (Tobin, 2009, p. 157)

This is what Tobin identifies as the narrative rug-pull  - an authorial trick which undermines expectations but keeps the reader content that this undermining has been done 'in the spirit of fair play' (p. 157). \This is of course particularly important in detective fiction. Such a twist means that the reader has to reinterpret the information which they already have in a way that changes their entire understanding of the situation.

Tobin gives the following quotation from Dorothy L. Sayers to sum up this dilemma for the mystery writer:

The reader must be given every clue - but he must not be told, surely, all the detective's deductions, lest he should see the solution too far ahead. Worse still, supposing, even without the detective's help, he interprets all the clues accurately on his own account, what becomes of the surprise? How can we at the same time show the reader everything and yet legitimately obfuscate him as to its meaning? (Sayers, 1929, p. 97)

The embedded perspective

So, Tobin argues, the author can take advantage of the curse of knowledge by aligning a narrative with an embedded viewpoint - a strong narrator, in other words, so that the reader strongly identifies what they know with what the narrator knows - or claims to know. The stronger the belief in the narrator's perspective, the 'more vulnerable he or she will be to a narrative rug-pull. This is why unreliable narrators remain and especially dependable resource for setting up this kind of surprise twist' (Tobin, 2009, p. 166). And Dr Sheppard in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a particularly unreliable narrator!

Tobin reports that the twist at the end of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd created 'genuine sensation' when it was published (p. 166) even though it wasn't the first time this kind of structure or revelation had been used in crime fiction. (She suggests Poe's 'The Tell Tale Heart' as a comparator.) She quotes two contemporary reactions:

Willard Huntington Wright (1927): 'the trick played on the reader in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is hardly a legitimate device of the detective-story writer'
vs
Dorothy L. Sayers (1929): 'this opinion [Huntington Wright's] merely represents a natural resentment at having been ingeniously bamboozled. All the necessary data are given.'

Because Dr Sheppard is the narrator, Tobin argues, the reader's perspective is strongly aligned with his, which enables the surprise at the end. She suggests it is particularly unsettling for the reader to discover that a trusted narrator has been unreliable - in other words, when what we thought we knew, turns out to be a drastic misinterpretation of the facts.

There is a further reason, Tobin suggests, that this twist is so effective in this case:

Another reason that Christie's version of this twist was so effective and surprising, of course, was the way that it played on other conventions of the genre. The narrator of Roger Ackroyd fills a conventional role, that of the faithful sidekick exemplified by Dr John Watson, the friend and confidant of Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective Sherlock Holmes. As the narrator of the Holmes stories Watson serves as both the detective's assistant and the reader's proxy. He is clever enough to follow Holmes' reasoning when it is explained to him, but never so excessively brilliant that the explanation would be unnecessary. He is capable and faithful; if he were not, the perceptive Holmes would surely not rely on him. (Tobin, 2009, p 167)

As a result, we trust Sheppard because we think we know who he is - not in terms of the narrative, but in terms of the genre in which that narrative falls.


Tobin, V. (2009) 'Cognitive bias and the poetics of surprise', Language and Literature 18 (2), pp. 155-172