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Loading... Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?: The Mystery Behind the Agatha Christie Mysteryby Pierre Bayard
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  jholcomb | Dec 12, 2009 |  In this slim volume Bayard disects Christie's book and conclusion to the murder. At times it is difficult to follow the psychological lingo, but he makes many good points and following his entire line of reasoning I was able to come to the identity of the "real" murderer before he revealed it. And I was RIGHT ! This book makes you look at mysteries in a different light. (  ) book58lover | Oct 29, 2009 | Poirot might have been wrong all along. In Who Killed Roger Ackroyd, Pierre Bayard blasts Poirot’s shocking solution to the Roger Ackroyd murder by pointing to all its glaring weaknesses. He gives us a tour through the techniques by which Agatha Christie and other writers hide the truth in plain sight in their novels, discusses delusions and classical detective stories as far back as Oedipus Rex, and, in the tradition of the genre, presents his surprising solution near the end. Though Bayard’s solution doesn’t have the shock factor of the original novel, it’s more logical, elegant, and poetic than Poirot’s –an excellent read if you enjoyed the original. Just two warnings: Bayard gives away the ending to a huge number of Christie’s plots, and the discussions on psychoanalysis and text interpretation get a bit heady at times. Whether you like that depends on your taste. ( )1  jorgearanda | Jun 11, 2008 | Loses something in translation or maybe it's just not nice to fool with Agatha Christie! (  ) dibertmerleen | Jan 2, 2007 | If you ever meet anyone who whines that your reading of a novel "isn't what the author intended", point them in the direction of this scholarly yet amusing book - anyone with an open mind would have to admit that Bayard's reading of Christie's seminal mystery is utterly ingenious and in some respects more satisfying than the original. Was it what Christie "intended"? Of course not, but the reading is nonetheless perfectly valid! (One word of warning - Bayard drops spoilers for other Christie mysteries along the way, notably her posthumous work CURTAIN. Approach WHO KILLED ROGER ACKROYD only if you've read most of the Poirot mysteries.) (  )1 bibliotheque | Aug 2, 2006 |  no reviews | add a review
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But until the arrival of this provocative rereading of the case, written by a psychoanalyst and translated from the French, it is likely that not one of them ever doubted the validity of the solution as worked out by the redoubtable Hercule Poirot. After all, if the author's own detective had incorrectly followed the clues laid down for him, what kind of unsteady ground was the reader left standing on?
Although Bayard makes it clear that those picking up his book don't necessarily have to return to the original text--he does give a very concise summary of the principal characters and actions of Christie's story--it is an exercise, really a pleasure, that I urge you toward. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is such a landmark of the genre that it is not just a bit of nostalgia, a form of genial time travel, but also a reminder of what the Golden Age of the mystery novel was all about: the matching of wits between writer and reader, with puzzles that truly puzzled and were made all the more satisfying by the operative credo of fair play.
To address the actual plot of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is to risk spoiling the fun. Let's just say there is an English village, King's Abbott, in which a bluff country squire, the much-mentioned Ackroyd, resides until his untimely death, [stabbed] by an unknown assailant. Unfortunately for the murderer--or so one used to think, pre-Pierre Bayard--there is also in the village a retired Belgian police inspector, the unparalleled M. Hercule Poirot. Poirot's celebrated "little grey cells," those he uses to form his theories of a case, steadily power the investigation to its startling conclusion, one that has always been as magnificent for its shock value as for its apparently irrefutable logic. That Professor Bayard's delicate probing of the book's structure manages to turn it convincingly in a fresh direction, toward an actual murderer never even suspected, is a triumph of scholarship that is at once playful and serious.
How we approach classic texts should never be as static an experience as we generally allow it to be, a truth proved anew by Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? It now joins a list of other similarly clever literary treats, among which I include Rex Stout's "Watson Was a Woman" and Frederick Crews's The Pooh Perplex. --Otto Penzler
(retrieved from Amazon Wed, 06 Jan 2010 10:34:46 -0500)
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Wikipedia in English
While the premise is interesting, the execution is boring. Much of the book is taken up with literary theory about the nature of narration, the definition of delusion, etc., containing sentences like "While these are meant to falsify the reader's perception of the literary reality (done most effectively by exhibition), the lie by omission conjures away certain elements of that reality by failing to communicate them to the reader." It's the kind of writing that drove me out of grad school in English, not that would interest the general reader. Still, if you're a big Christie fan, up for a bit of a challenge, and willing to do some skimming, Bayard's proposal is interesting. (