Week 5: Golden Age I Agatha Christie The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)

Agatha Christie (1890-1976) Born in 1890 in Torquay, to a well-off middle-class family. She was educated at home. In 1914 she married Archie Christie, a qualified aviator. During WWI she worked with the Voluntary Aid Detachment at the Red Cross Hospital in Torquay. This included a stint in the dispensary and she completed the Society of Apothecaries’ examination. In WWII, she volunteered at the Dispensary at University College Hospital, London. She began writing detective stories during WWI. Her debut novel was The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). The sleuth Hercule Poirot was not based on a particular person, but there were Belgian refugees in England. Christie continued to write and soon created her other sleuths – Tommy and Tuppence and Miss Marple. In 1926, she infamously disappeared for 11 days, following the breakdown of her marriage. She was granted a divorce from Archie in 1928, and lived with their daughter, Rosalind. In 1930, Agatha married her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan. She would join him on his expeditions. Christie was a prodigious writer. At the height of her success (1920s/30s) she typically produced 2-3 books a year, but her output slowed down after WWII. Overall, she wrote 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections. She also wrote six romance novels under the name Mary Westmacott, and wrote for the stage. She died in 1976.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) Originally serialised in the London Evening News from July-Sept 1925, under the title Who Killed Ackroyd? Later released as a novel by Christie’s new publisher, Michael Collins, in 1926. Her third novel featuring Poirot. Previously: The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) and The Murder on the Links (1923); as well as a short-story collection, Poirot Investigates (1924). Familiar setting: small village, country house (closed circle of suspects; servants/masters), locked room mystery. Narrated by Dr James Sheppard, who seems to stand-in for Hastings as Poirot’s sidekick. The story is known for its shocking plot twist – device of the unreliable narrator. In her autobiography, Christie suggested that the basic idea was given to her by her brother-in-law, James Watts, who said ‘almost everybody turns out to be a criminal nowadays in detective stories – even the detective. What I would like to see is a Watson who turned out to be a criminal’. Lord Louis Mountbatten had also written to Christie with a similar idea before she began writing the novel. Christie later acknowledged the character Caroline Sheppard as a possible precursor to Miss Marple. The story has had a huge influence and legacy – in 2013, the Crime Writers’ Association voted it the best crime novel ever.

Golden Age and Fair Play ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction in Britain: roughly coincided with the period between the two world wars when the genre flourished. Term coined by John Strachey in a 1939 essay. Idea developed by Howard Haycraft in Murder for Pleasure (1941). Major writers: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh. Readership: suburban, middle-class, mostly female. Golden Age fiction typically seen as elevating plot above all else. Flat characterisation? Christie was a member of the Detection Club, an elite circle of crime writers which formed in 1928. The group developed a set of principles for the detective fiction genre. Plots were supposed to emphasise logic and rationality over intuition and authors were expected to give readers a fair chance to solve the crime. In a later foreword to the novel (1948), Christie said she had taken ‘pleasure in refuting’ accusations of cheating ‘by calling attention to various turns of phrasing and careful wording’. Sayers, a fellow member of the Detection Club, defended Christie. She suggested that astute readers should consider every character a suspect.

Golden Age and Fair Play: The Rules The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end. No Chinaman must figure in the story. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right. The detective must not himself commit the crime. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them. - Ronald A. Knox, ‘A Detective Story Decalogue’, in ‘Introduction’, The Best Detective Stories of 1928 (London: Faber and Faber, 1929). 

Golden Age and Fair Play: The Rules The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery… No wilful tricks or deceptions may be played on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective. There must be no love interest in the story. The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit. The culprit must be determined by logical deductions – not by accident, coincidence or unmotivated confession. The detective novel must have a detective in it... There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel… No lesser crime than murder will suffice. The problem of the crime must be solved by strictly naturalistic means. There must be but one detective… The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story… Servants […] must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed. Secret societies […] have no place in a detective story. The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be rational and scientific. The truth of the problem must be at all times apparent – provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it. A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, and no ‘atmospheric’ preoccupations. A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt in a detective novel. A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide. The motives for all the crimes in detective stories should be personal. A few of the devices which no self-respecting detective-story writer will now avail himself of: e.g. the unmasking of a twin; the bogus séance to force a confession; the dog that does not bark, thus revealing the intruder was familiar. - S.S. Van Dine, ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories’, The American Magazine (Sept 1928). 

Critical Reception ‘Christie is not only an expert technician and a remarkably good story-teller, but she knows, as well, just the right number of hints to offer as to the real murderer. In the present case his identity is made all the more baffling through the author's technical cleverness in selecting the part he is to play in the story; and yet her non- committal characterization of him makes it a perfectly fair procedure. The experienced reader will probably spot him, but it is safe to say that he will often have his doubts as the story unfolds itself.’ - New York Times Book Review, 1926.

Critical Reception ‘Christie perfected a structure, best called the clue-puzzle, which invited and empowered the careful reader to solve the problem along with the detective. The individualism and the sense of isolation inherent to the audience who shared the basic bourgeois values were themselves activated by the overall form of the novel. It is true that many readers could not solve the puzzle, and hardly tried to do so; indeed some novels are not quite fairly open to such solving. But these facts do not remove the crucial ideological force of the clue-puzzle, which marshalled the simple skills of a respectable, leisured, reading public…’ - Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Detective Fiction, 1980.

Murderous Doctors In real-life: William Palmer (1824-56) – the ‘Rugeley poisoner’. Convicted for the murder of his friend John Cook. Also suspected of murdering his wife, children and brother for their life insurance policies. Edward William Pritchard (1825-56) – convicted of murdering his wife and mother-in-law by poison. Executed in Glasgow. Thomas Neill Cream (1850-92) – the ‘Lambeth poisoner’. A Scottish-Canadian serial killer. Hawley Harvey Crippen (1862-1910) – an American homeopath, hanged for the murder of his wife Cora. In fiction: Ellen Wood’s Mr Castonel (1857) and Dr Carlton in Lord Oakburn’s Daughters (1864) Julia Frankau’s Dr Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll (1887) Dr Grimesby Roylott in Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ (1892)