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).
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