The Resurrection of Roger Ackroyd

Many years ago, the literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote a piece for The New Yorker called “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” It’s very entertaining, and he scores some good points, but his chief complaint is that murder mysteries, as a genre, can’t be camouflaged as literature, and in quick succession, he takes Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham over the coals, and rests in his labors.

You could make a similar case against baseball, or Bob Ross, or Hummel figurines. And it’s no defense to say, Oh, so many people love it – whatever it is. Wilson takes issue with the conceit of the detective story as a whole. It rests on an implausibility, that a shaky set of conventions are enough to overcome negligent craftsmanship, and the puzzle is reward enough, in itself. But in the examples Wilson cites, the puzzles lack engagement, because they’re completely artificial.

Wilson is also immune to the charms of a Lord Peter Wimsey, say, or a Poirot. Which is a fair criticism. Holmes, if he serves for our template, isn’t in any way real, as a character; he’s a collection of mannerisms, or antagonizing eccentricities. No wonder Doyle threw him over the Falls.

Edmund Wilson is shooting fish in a barrel. Holmes is a device, as is Wimsey, or Poirot. And the formal structure of the stories they feature in doesn’t admit of their character development. Other people, yes. I’ve always thought Sayers was writing novels of manners – bad manners, as it happens, but social satire. I think the same of Agatha Christie. It’s been remarked that Sayers is a little more elegant, and that Christie’s prose is simply sturdy, much like a pair of Miss Marple’s shoes, but that’s not an impediment. They’re writing about a certain vanishing class, that’s hanging on between the wars, but clearly an endangered species. It’s no accident that more than a few of those people turned into Nazi sympathizers. Look at the Mitford sisters. Sayers and Christie are utterly unsentimental about this entitled, self-important bunch, with their strangled upper-class diction and clotted condescension.

And Then There Were None is reportedly the best-selling mystery novel of all time, and The Mousetrap has run continuously in the West End for almost 70 years, until the COVID lockdown, but the book that made Christie’s early reputation is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, from 1926. It sets the bar for unreliable narrators (pace Tana French and Gillian Flynn), and the twist ending has the inevitability of all good show-stoppers. Ackroyd is of course where Edmund Wilson gets the title of his article, but he doesn’t get the last word.

I think what Wilson misses (leaving his obvious sexism to one side) is that the detective story is a deeply and inherently conservative genre, a force for social balance, pushing back against entropy. At least in what we call the Golden Age. Christie, like her contemporaries, is very much of the period. You can’t take her out of it, she doesn’t make sense, out of context. But this conservative ethic is just as true of Hammett, and Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. The social compact is broken, murder the most elemental violation of that order. The hero sets it right. The narrative arc is repair, and redemption.

The satisfactions of the mystery, or more properly, the detective story, aren’t exactly literary at all. Not that the writers aren’t skillful – Christie, for one, has enormous facility – but her object is, narrowly, political. She’s protecting the hearth.

You may not agree with me on this. Writers subvert the traditional, and eat their own young, no question. I would only argue that Christie’s virtues are reactionary. She’s full of mischief, and relishes deception, but her real gift is gravity. Christie is earthbound. It matters.