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Summary A* ENGLISH LITERATURE - MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD NOTES Critics
A* ENGLISH LITERATURE - MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD NOTES Critics
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Critics"The Murder of Roger Ackroyd freezes English rural society at a crucial turning point"
(Prichard)
" Poirot is portrayed as, 'in essence, nothing more than a brain, a moustachioed deus ex
machina: detective through and through'" (Thompson)
'Christie's characters are not psychological portraits" (Thompson)
"Animated algebra" (Francis Wyndham)
"The sense that there's rather more there than is apparent" (P D James)
"The allure of most detective fiction hinges on the existence of an investigator who is
smarter than the smartest criminals" (Swanson)
"If the police don't find you, something else - guilt, karma, madness - almost certainly will"
(Swanson)
Willard Huntington Wright - "the trick played on the reader in TMoRA is hardly a legitimate
device of the detective-story writer"
"no grief" [In relation to the death of Mr Ackroyd] (Thompson)
Christieʼs works have often been criticised as excessively utopian by hard-boiled writers of
crime fiction and literary critics, James (1991) credits her, correctly, with realising the
‘certain violent passions below the surfaceʼ of Kingʼs Abbot, which could act as a
microcosm of the country as a whole at the time.
It had preferred settings which expressed a narrow, if not deliberately elitist, vision of
society. And for heroes it had created detectives at best two-dimensional, at worst
tiresome. (Ian Ousby)
Scaggs (2010) has contended that Christie ‘consistently saw evil as the motivating force in
a criminalʼ
In a famous 1945 New Yorker essay, Edmund Wilson excoriated the genre of mystery
novels by asking, “Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?” – referring, of course, to Agatha
Christieʼs Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? Wilson found such novels “a waste of time,” and
concluded that “we shall do well to discourage the squandering of... paper that might be
put to better use.”
New York Times: "superior mystery".
As Julian Symons notes, “Every successful detective story in this period involved a deceit
practised upon the reader”9 , and here the trick is making the murderer the doctor, who
tells the story and functions as Poirotʼs Watson. The murderer appears at first as an
accepted and often respected figure. Nevertheless, this mask is stripped away towards
the end of the book, when his real features as lawbreaker are revealed.
Contextually the novel was deeply criticised at the time of its publication. This is because
it was believe that Christie was not "playing fair" by directly deceiving the readers. After
being misdirected the reader is left bewildered at the identity of the murderer. Doing this
allowed her to upheave social pretence making us as readers less secure in our
expectations.
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