Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?: The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mystery

Agatha Christie's private detective Hercule Poirot and mystery devotees alike have presumed for three quarters of a century that Dr. James Sheppard, the narrator of the 1926 novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, is the only possible culprit in the title character's death. In this inquiry into the way readers perceive and writers construct the perfect mystery, Bayard, a French psychoanalyst, presents the possibility that Sheppard was wrongly accused. Examining this classic novel through a Freudian lens, Bayard discovers flaws in Poirot's deductive reasoning that led to the allegation, and shows how to find the real killer by learning how to see a certain way. That kind of seeing involves paying attention not only to the obscuring of information, but also to its omission, or ""psychic blindness,"" a literary convention of which Christie was a master, according to Bayard. Employing his knowledge of psychoanalytic and literary theory, and the Van Dine principle--the 20 rules of the detective mystery, established by S.S. Van Dine in the 1928 issue of the American Magazine--Bayard conducts a close reading of the novel to demonstrate how he came to consider Sheppard's innocence, and further suggests that we rethink the deaths of literary characters Madame Bovary and Bergotte, ask what happened to Les Liaisons dangereuses's Madame de Merteuil after her flight to Holland and contemplate who really unleashed the disaster in Emile Zola's Germinal. Bayard is an intuitive and passionate reader of the genre, and manages to build suspense while mounting his airtight argument against Sheppard as murderer and to finger the real killer. (June)