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Schwanebeck, Wieland. “Deconstructing the Detective: Agatha Christie’s Poirot Novels and the Role of the Reader.” Hercule Poirot Trifft Miss Marple: Agatha Christie Intermedial, edited by Judith Kretzschmar et al., Büchner-Verlag - Wissenschaft und Kultur, 2016, pp. 47–66. Deconstructing the Detective: Agatha Christie’s Poirot Novels and the Role of the Reader

Wieland Schwanebeck

Introduction

All classical detectives are story-tellers, even though they rarely narrate their adventures themselves, delegating the task to their assistants. Many crime writers have adapted this setup and strengthened the privileged position which the detective enjoys – infinitely enlarged through the perspective of the loyal deputy whose limited intellectual and abductive abilities act as the proverbial magnifying glass and allow the detective to take on larger-than-life dimensions. Before the advent of the hard-boiled school and its emphasis on self-reliant, cynical investi- gators such as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, the genre re- mained firmly in the grasp of the traditional set-up, a convention that Beatrix Finke summarises as the »Watson perspective«: the narrator dutifully accepts his limited knowledge and reconstructs the story from the perspective of an »experiencing I«, his erroneous assumptions about the case providing possible explanations which the reader can then safely eliminate.1 It is not before the final chapters of the narrative that the detective himself imposes his own narrative authority upon the proceedings, thus swapping the role of the critical reader for that of a homodiegetic narrator hardly restrained by limited viewpoint or focalization, in Gér- ard Genette’s terminology:2 when he gets around to reconstructing the story of the crime, the detective has the privilege of omniscience: »Me, I know everything«3, Poirot asserts confidently.

—————— 1 Cf. Finke 1983, 109–139. 2 Cf. Genette 1980, 189–194. 3 Christie 1987, 213. 48  

It is this very privilege that I would like to scrutinise in this chapter, first of all by characterising the narrative conventions to which it is tied. I will primarily draw upon novels from the 1930s, a decade frequently singled out as the most productive one of Christie’s career,4 and the last one to be associated with the »Golden Age« of detective fiction, when writers tended to adhere to genre guidelines playfully set down in prescriptive rule-books.5 During this period, Christie perfected her formula and settled into a narrative pattern organised around her investigator, Hercule Poirot, a character whom she found insufferable in later years.6 However, he has proven to be her most enduring creation and the one most strongly linked to the narrative convention that my inquiry will focus on: the ending that is »unexpected but possible at the same time«7. Following an introduction to Christie’s narrative paradigm and the method employed by her detective, I will outline some critical strategies which deconstruct both of them and which attempt to strengthen the position of the reader, including a number of parodies and Pierre Bayard’s »detective criticism«.

The Detective as a Privileged Narrator

Ever since Edgar Allan Poe coined the trope of the armchair detective who is never without his loyal yet highly inferior sidekick, the detective novel has been characterised by an on-going battle between narrators and readers, and it usually tells the story of an act of reading: the investigator unravels the crime »written« (and then hidden) by the murderer —————— 4 Cf. Wagoner 1986, 47. 5 In these somewhat ironic rule-books, writers were »challenged to design ingenious plots, peppered with red-herrings as well as genuine clues, so that the key to the solution, while theoretically accessible to those resourceful enough, will retain at least an element of surprise and command the readers’ satisfied admiration« (Ciocia 2015, 109). The question whether Christie herself actually belongs into the canon of the »Golden Age« is a controversial one. Carl R. Lovitt, for one, points out that Christie rarely played it fair and thus frequently violated the genre rules (Cf. Lovitt 1990, 69–71). 6 Cook 2013, 118. 7 Gutkowski 2011, 51.    49 and erects his own successful narrative in its place.8 His »writing«, thus placed over the first narrative account, must be acknowledged as the definite version of the events to make for a successful reading experi- ence – »successful« in the sense that it satisfies both the reader’s desire to unravel the hermeneutic code of the narrative9 and that it acknowl- edges the powerful detective figure as an ideological agent, one who claims to bring light into darkness and who reinstalls a system that has been disrupted by a barbaric act threatening its stability. e privilege exercised by the detective – to present his version of the events as the definitive one – is clearly pronounced in Christie’s novels. Her chapter headings emphasise the schematic nature of the overall construction: throughout the investigation, they are named after the respective suspect who is giving testimony,10 whereas the final few chapters (the solution is usually split over a few of them, followed by a brief epilogue) bear titles such as »e Last Link« (e Mysterious Affair at Styles, 1920), »e Truth« (Cards on the Table, 1936), »e Whole Truth« (e Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 1926), »Poirot Speaks« or »e Story« (Lord Edgware Dies, 1933). ese paratextual signals underline the credibility of what is to follow, so that nobody is likely to doubt the detective’s promise: »›Come, my friends,‹ [Poirot] said gently. ›Let me tell you the real story of what happened last night.‹«11 Christie’s readers are familiar with what happens in these chapters, as the novels tend to involve the same stereotypical setup:12 having in- terviewed all the suspects individually, Poirot gathers them all in one room to present them with the result of his enquiry. Here, Christie —————— 8 Cf. Hühn 1987, 454–457. 9 Cf. Barthes 1990, 18–20. 10 In Lord Edgware Dies (1933), the chapter headings simply announce: »The Widow«, »The Secretary«, »The Egoist«, »The Daughter«, »The Nephew«, »Sir Montagu Corner«, »The Butler«, »The Other Man«, »A Great Lady«, »The Taxi- Driver«, »Ronald’s Story«. In Murder in Mesopotamia (1936), several interviewees are grouped into individual chapters: »The Suspects«, »Miss Johnson, Mrs Mer- cado, Mr Reiter«, or »Mr Mercado, Richard Carey«. 11 Christie 1980, 184. 12 There are several deviations from the pattern, of course: in some novels, Christie hands over the privilege of the full explanation to the culprit. Lord Edgware Dies is a case in point, a novel that evokes Conan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia (1891): it is the confession penned by the actress Jane Wilkinson which concludes the book, whose wish »to be remembered« (189) is thus honoured. 50  

(who also authored 17 plays, some of them stage adaptations of her own novels and short stories) clearly toys with the genre of drama,13 and in effect, her novels are, to some degree, intermedial works in themselves. e notions of theatricality and acting pervade her writing,14 nowhere more so than in these climactic dénouements. Here, Poirot (in recounting the minutiae of his investigation and presenting the truth to his baffled auditorium) resembles a rather melodramatic actor who clearly enjoys his role as the »explicator who solves all riddles and answers all questions«15, as the following introductory passages from some of Christie’s final chapters suggest: »e company once assembled, Poirot rose from his seat with the air of a popular lecturer, and bowed politely to his audience.«16 »Hercule Poirot sat in a big arm-chair. e wall lights had been turned out. Only a rose-shaded lamp shed its glow on the figure in the arm-chair. ere seemed something symbolic about it – he alone in the light […] [and] Poirot’s audience – sitting in the outer darkness.«17 »ere was a momentary pause. Strangely enough, all indignation and all rancour had died down. Hercule Poirot held his audience under the spell of his personality. ey watched him, fascinated, as he began slowly to speak.«18 What follows is a lengthy speech, in some cases up to twelve pages which are not interrupted by any segment of extradiegetic narration, part monologue and part soliloquy: the detective may be addressing the other characters, yet he seems quite unaware of them, »addressing himself to space rather than to his listeners.«19 is is not to say that

—————— 13 This is most evident in Three Act Tragedy, where Poirot matches wits with the actor Sir Charles Cartwright, who has planned his murder according to theatrical conventions, with a ›dress rehearsal‹ killing before the actual deed. The first chapter is preceded by stage credits, with Sir Charles announced as the »director«, and Poirot cheekily credited as the »illuminator« (Christie 1935, 9). The novel’s last chapter is entitled »Curtain« (as is Christie’s final Poirot novel). 14 Cf. York 2007, 35–47. 15 Wagoner 1986, 34. 16 Christie 1938, 170. 17 Christie 1935, 233. 18 Christie 1977, 235. 19 Christie 1935, 233.    51 the audience is completely silent throughout: in fact, several roles are assigned to them. e person eventually revealed as the murderer will initially voice denial and indignation before breaking down, over- whelmed by the sheer force of the narrative; suspects who are cleared of major allegations will admit to other shortcomings and white lies (and thus bear further testimony to Poirot’s superiority); the sidekick, on the other hand, honours his part of the bargain and provides tags and incredulous little questions, turning the presentation into a kind of inverted Socratic dialogue (as the interrogator does not reveal the speaker’s ignorance and limitations, but allows him to shine).20 is becomes obvious when one compiles some the utterances voiced by Hastings throughout Poirot’s reconstruction of e Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920):21 »What do you mean by deceiving me as you have done?« (179) »Yes, but why?« (180) »Yes, but –« (180) »Yes, yes,« I said impatiently. »Go on.« (181) »But why?« (181) »Wait a moment. I don’t see why he wished to be arrested?« (181) »I am still a little fogged [...],« I remarked. (182) »I don’t understand.« (184) »Yes, but I don’t see –« (186) »But why?« (187) »You are joking, Poirot!« (189) Hastings repeatedly begs Poirot to go on and asks for additional explanations, yet he seldom questions his friend’s method or the validity of his arguments. Criticism of that variety only came with post-1960s de- constructive readings of the detective novel, which frequently attacked its ideological project: to nurse a weakened patriarchal system back to strength. e detective, whose unconventional methods and superiority over paid officials cannot camouflage the fact that his function (sim- ilar to that of the police) is a stabilising, restorative one, is thus marked

—————— 20 Of course, this mainly applies to the novels in which Poirot is accompanied by his trusted assistant – Hastings largely disappears from Christie’s novels after the 1930s. 21 Christie 1938. 52   out as a loyal agent in service of the loi du père,22 and one whose god- like abilities constantly short-change the reader.

A Ridiculous Method?

Poirot frequently emphasises his critical view of the methods applied by Sherlock Holmes, as he seldom goes down on all fours to examine footprints and neither shares Holmes’s knowledge of 140 different va- rieties of tobacco ash23 nor his belief that »a man’s calling is plainly revealed« by his »fingernails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boot, by his trou- ser-knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb«.24 Poirot rather trusts in his ability to seek out contradictions in his suspects’ accounts and to scrutinise their psychological disposition: »I had to fall back upon the psychology of the crime and the personality of the murderer!«25 However, he (like Holmes) gathers clues and infers from them the most likely version of the events, constructing his narrative by »matching perceived objects or events to possible episodes in a se- quence of intended or accidental events«26. is process is frequently (yet inaccurately) characterised as deduction in classical detective fiction,27 though it is more accurately described as abduction, a method that goes back to medical morphology and that was widely adapted by diverse disciplines such as art history or psychoanalysis at the end of the 19th century.28 Abduction involves reading symptoms in order to hypothesise their most likely explanation, which is not to be confused with deduction, a form of logical reasoning which yields irrefutable yet also borderline tautological results. Abduction leads to an outcome that —————— 22 See Ebert 1992 and Jann 1995 for detailed accounts of the genre’s ideological project. 23 Doyle 2008, 71. 24 Doyle 2001, 20. 25 Christie 1949, 210. 26 York 2007, 107. 27 Arthur Conan Doyle’s first two Sherlock Holmes novels both contain chapters entitled »The Science of Deduction«, wherein Holmes formulates his professional creed. 28 See Ginzburg 1980 for a detailed account of the method’s history.    53 is far from certain: neither are clues objective findings (as they only become clues by way of a prejudiced selection process), nor do they »add up to evidence, at least not to evidence which places guilt beyond reasonable doubt«29. Nevertheless, though it may be a gamble (or, to quote Charles Sanders Peirce’s famous assessment, »nothing but guess- ing«30), abduction is an important method, for the scientific process requires creative guesswork, that is, »a pure hypothesis, originated from the researcher’s imagination«31. at the result is, ultimately, quite un- certain – out of 100 scientific hypotheses, 99 may well turn out to be completely wrong –, compromises the ideological project of the detective novel, which favours the view »that beneath the chaotic surface of life exists an underlying order to which all details can be linked by the trained observer«32. Poirot’s own metaphoric account of his work im- plicitly hints at the dubiousness of this project: »To reconstruct the crime«, he explains to his audience, »that is the aim of the detective. To reconstruct a crime you must place one fact upon another just as you place one card on another in building a house of cards. And if the facts will not fit – if the card will not balance – well – you must start your house again, or else it will fall …«33 A house of cards, when built by a skilful »architect«, is beautiful to look at, yet one slight probing with the finger will cause the whole structure to collapse. In order to camouflage the fragility of its proposed solution, then, the detective invokes the idea of deduction and thus »borrows syllogistic forms from logic, in order to convince his auditor« and to give its central argument »a connotation of necessity: just like mathe- matical deductions, the inferences made by the detective are developed as if they were infallible lines of thought«34. At times, Christie’s novels —————— 29 York 2007, 108. Similarly, Pierre Bayard argues that »the clue is less a sign already present than a sign that is constituted after the fact in the movement of interpretation, which, by proposing a definitive meaning, ranks the givens and builds a plausible textual structure backwards« (Bayard 2000, 69). 30 Peirce 1979, 137. 31 Wouters 2011, 102. 32 Jann 1995, 50. According to Wouters, there is »a connection between the hero’s infallible reasoning in the fictional detective world and the lack of certainty in the modern world« (Wouters 2011, 110). 33 Christie 1935, 233. 34 Wouters 2011, 104. 54   seem acutely aware of this epistemic abyss, yet any fault-lines are quickly glossed over by the sheer weight of Poirot’s personality. When Superintendent Battle, who has followed Poirot’s investigation in Cards on the Table, questions the value of Poirot’s findings (»It’s only a hypothesis, but it’s possible.«), Poirot responds: »It is a little more than possible, my friend – it is also probable.«35 A little later, Mrs Lor- rimer wagers that »[n]o one can always be right«, which provokes a similarly confident response: »›I am,‹ said Poirot. ›Always I am right. It is so invariable that it startles me.‹«36 Whilst critics have commented on occasional inconsistencies in Christie’s stories,37 the detective’s solution and his self-proclaimed wis- dom have largely gone without any criticism: the author is careful to justify the existence of all the clues spread throughout the novel by assigning a place to them in the concluding narrative, so that the effect is that of a crossword puzzle neatly solved. Consequently, her readers are often too much taken with the picturesque arrangements of her »card houses« to search for weak spots. It was up to subsequent spoofs and rewritings of Christie’s work to rectify this situation: like other iconic sleuths, Poirot has been frequently subjected to parodic treat- ments, his investigative method mocked as mercilessly as his colourful personality. Not all of these parodies completely liberate themselves from Christie’s tested formula, yet they encourage their audience not to be intimidated by the detective and to look closer.

—————— 35 Christie 2001, 254 36 Ibd., 272. 37 Cook 2013, 13 f.    55

Fig. 1 and 2: Poirot gives a Brechtian introduction (e Alphabet Mur- ders, 00:00:31–00:00:41).

Frank Tashlin’s inspired pastiche of Christie’s e Alphabet Murders (UK 1965) is a loose adaptation of the source-text, supplementing it by numerous slapstick elements imaginatively staged by the director, a former Looney Tunes animator and frequent collaborator of Jerry Lewis. e ﬁlm’s most stunning achievement, however, is neither its generous use of burlesque elements nor its famous Poirot/Miss Marple encounter, as the two characters (played by Tony Randall and Marga- ret Rutherford) bump into each other outside a police station. What makes e Alphabet Murders a unique Christie adaptation is the 56  

Brechtian distance it affords its viewers, as Randall breaks the fourth wall right at the beginning, announcing the credits and changing into costume right before the audience’s eyes (fig. 1 and 2), encouraging them to trade mimesis for meta-awareness and to challenge the film’s ideological proposition. Other parodies simply cut the detective down to size: in an episode of Muppets Tonight (S1E8, 1996), Poirot (Jason Alexander) guest-stars in »Murder on the Dis-Oriented Express«, but he never gets around to interviewing the suspects, as the Muppets confuse him for Hercules and inquire how he hides his muscles underneath the waist-coat. e Benny Hill Show spoofs the same Christie novel in »Murder on the Oregon Express« (S7E3, 1976): Poirot only makes a cameo appear- ance, but the investigation (here led by popular American TV sleuth McCloud) also pokes fun at Poirot’s habit of squeezing confessions out of his suspects without having any definite proof on his hands. As McCloud confronts several suspects with his alleged omniscience (»I know everything!«), several of them come forward, admitting to having slept with the detective’s wife or to being his father, but not to the murder. Even animated programs have paid their homage to Christie’s work: in 1993, the Steven Spielberg-produced series Animaniacs pre- sented »Hercule Yakko« (S1E25), a Christie pastiche that opts for all- out, Marx Brothers-inspired zaniness: the detective does not assemble the suspects to solve the case, but »because you can’t play charades with three people.« In another memorable scene, cartoon logic is employed to expose the questionable and selective nature of the abductive method, which always depends on a highly selective, biased choice of what really constitutes a clue.38 When the detective asks his assistant to examine the crime scene and to »put all the clues in this bag«, his loyal helper obliges him by packing up the whole room (fig. 3-5).

—————— 38 »There is a sense in which clues are created by the detective: it is the act of noticing that makes them into clues.« (York 2007, 104 f.).    57

Fig. 3–5: e detective’s method, as reimagined by the Animaniacs (»Her- cule Yakko«, 00:06:23–00:06:28). 58  

Robert Moore’s Murder by Death (USA 1976), a Neil Simon-scripted farce which ridicules all the classical whodunit tropes, is worth men- tioning as it is one of the few meta-literary parodies to give voice to the reader’s perspective and to hold court over the genre’s shortcomings. Poirot is caricatured as Milo Perrier (James Coco), an overweight ego- maniac with a bad toupee (ﬁg. 6), whose French phrases are constantly misunderstood39 and who is often outwitted by his chauﬀeur (James Cromwell). Demonstrations of his skill border on sorcery (Perrier smells a telephone wire and concludes it must have been snipped about an hour before), and consequently, his outrageous solution is down- right ridiculed by his host (Truman Capote), who gives the assembled detectives a piece of his mind: »You’ve all been so clever for so long, you’ve forgotten to be humble. You’ve tricked and fooled your readers for years. You’ve tortured us all with surprise endings that made no sense. […] You’ve withheld clues and information that made it impossible for us to guess who did it. But now the tables are turned. Millions of angry mystery readers are now getting their revenge.«

Fig. 6: e detective cut down to size (Murder by Death, 01:24:09).

—————— 39 When Perrier asks for »a cup of hot chocolate for me, n’est-ce pas«, the butler (Alec Guinness) responds, »I don’t think we have n’est-ce-pas, sir, just Hershey’s.«

   59

It is this idea of the »reader’s revenge« that I want to pursue in the remainder of this chapter, which will discuss the most comprehensive critique of the genre’s epistemic and narrative agenda proposed so far.

Pierre Bayard’s »Detective Criticism«

Pierre Bayard, a French literary scholar and author of numerous best- selling works of criticism (including a witty and informed volume on How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read, orig. 2007), has dedicated several analyses to a self-coined method which he characterises as »detective criticism«. Bayard re-investigates famous crime narratives, pos- iting alternative solutions to them (»solutions that are more satisfying to the soul«40) and thus arguing for an emancipated position of the reader, who is encouraged to challenge both the genre’s internal logic and the »Watson« role it ascribes to him: »Are we so certain that the dame aux camélias died a natural death? Is it unthinkable that Madame Bovary might have been murdered? And what do we really know about the death of Bergotte?«41 Where the conventional detective story merely accepts the possibility of other solutions yet advertises »the one proposed by the detective [...] as being the only true one«42, Bayard happily »wallow[s] in the delirium of interpretation«43 to seek out gaps and inconsistencies in the source texts, presenting the result of his own »counter-investigation« in the

—————— 40 Bayard 2008, 57. In one memorable case, Agatha Christie herself suggests that there may well be another explanation than the one given by Poirot: the stage adaptation of Appointment of Death (1945) contains a completely different solution than the novel. 41 Bayard 2000, ix. As becomes evident from the quote, Bayard does not limit himself to detective fiction and also revises the murder plots of classical tragedies like Soph- ocles’s Oedipus Rex (2008, 57–59) and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Enquête sur Hamlet, 2002). 42 Wouters 2011, 104. 43 Motte 2011, 280. 60   form of an immensely readable »detective novel about a detective novel«44 – one no less compelling than the original. Bayard’s playful approach to detective fiction is not in itself decon- structive, yet it invokes poststructuralist works like Jacques Derrida’s Signéponge (1984), with whose satirical and emancipatory subtext it shares many similarities. In his essay, Derrida revisits the signature problem that he addresses repeatedly throughout his writings, and he also attacks the widely-held fetishisation of the author figure, a project initiated by Roland Barthes’ ground-breaking essay, e Death of the Author (1967). Using the works of French poet Francis Ponge as a point of departure, Derrida ironically adopts some of the author-cen- tred rhetoric so characteristic of the 19th century obsession with the solitary, self-reliant author figure, and reads Ponge’s poetry as a mani- festation of a perfect »writing-signature«, the name (é)ponge (»sponge«) and the work constituting »the absolute idiom of a contract«.45 e punchline is Derrida’s ability to derive actual results from this ex- tremely arbitrary endeavour and to show that »the accident of his [Ponge’s] name« becomes manifest in the poems, suggesting not only that we are under the law of name and signature,46 but also that the alea always informs the act of reading.47 As Derrida playfully posits the onomastic signature as a master signifier, this sense-making operation is, of course, ironically subverted by its arbitrary nature, which puts all interpretative work into doubt. is is not too far removed from Bayard’s detective criticism: like Derrida and other poststructuralist critics, he attempts to strengthen the position of the reader. Bayard deconstructs the solution advertised by the detective novel and attacks the ideological position of the detective (as well as that of the author), citing psychoanalytical positions to argue for a kind of textual unconscious »buried as a hidden meaning«, where (unbeknownst to both the detective and the author), the actual solution becomes manifest.48 Bayard, who is certainly no less theatrical —————— 44 Bayard 2000, viii. 45 Derrida 1984, 48. 46 Cf. ibd., 18–19. 47 Ibd., 116. 48 Bayard 2000, 19–20. In his reinvestigation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Bayard argues that Conan Doyle’s hatred of his own creation led him to become a »victim    61 than Christie when it comes to presenting his findings,49 is not so much interested in stipulating his own counter-narrative than he is in high- lighting that all virtuoso explanations ultimately serve the questionable agenda of putting the reader in his place: »although the detective can connect the elements to reach the truth, the reader usually cannot«50. Out of all the novels in Christie’s œuvre, Bayard selects her most famous and also most controversial work, e Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), for a closer inspection. It is this book more than any other which earned the author massive protests, as she had allegedly violated the genre’s self-imposed ›fair play‹ code: the novel’s famous twist ending reveals that the murderer is the Hastings substitute, Dr. Sheppard, who has served as the narrator and as Poirot’s sidekick during the investigation,51 a solution that hints at the author’s being torn between »reassuring her conservative readers« and »creating detective fiction’s most serious challenge to their ideology«52. Dr. Sheppard is an affront to the renowned genre formula, rebelling against the limitations of his role (he is a »Watson« character far more involved in the story than he can freely admit) and openly challenging Poirot’s authority: Sheppard merely keeps a record of the events so that he can publish »the history of one of Poirot’s failures«53. In Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, Bayard builds his case on the observation that Poirot’s solution contains a number of improbabilities and rests on a fundamental paradox: Shep- pard is revealed to be an unreliable narrator, yet the book’s ending (Sheppard pens his own confession before committing suicide) depends on our trusting this man. If, however,

—————— of the Holmes complex« (Bayard 2008, 145) and to unconsciously will the detective into failing. 49 On the performative dimension of Bayard’s writing, see Motte 2011, 273. 50 Gutkowski 2011, 52. 51 Emanuela Gutkowski (2011) presents an informative reading of Roger Ackroyd and its unreliable narration. She demonstrates that Dr. Sheppard, the narrator, misuses the cooperative principle but only really lies as a character, not as a narrator. 52 Lovitt 1990, 71. 53 Christie 1987, 233. There is an unresolvable paradox at work here, of course, for in order to fully reveal his superiority over Poirot, Sheppard would have to include his own confession. 62  

»Sheppard is a liar, if the act of stating is unreliable, then all of the book’s statements must be considered suspect and not, as Hercule Poirot urges, only a limited number of them«54. Bayard’s close reading of Sheppard’s confession reveals that it actually contains no free admission of guilt, but another series of indirections,55 from which Bayard infers that Sheppard only pens a confession in order to protect the actual killer, his sister Caroline. By opening up the investigation and fitting his explanation into the confines of Christie’s puzzle, Bayard suggests that the text cannot »come to a neat conclusion without the reader’s participation«,56 and that the audience must become aware of its power »to complete the work and to close, albeit temporarily, the world that it opens«57.

Conclusion

In 2014, Hercule Poirot came back with a vengeance: this year saw the publication of e Monogram Murders, the first continuation novel to be embraced by the Agatha Christie estate.58 It was British poet Sophie Hannah who had created a new adventure for the Belgian detective, a task she performed so successfully that some reviewers were baffled by her complete adaptation to the Christie paradigm.59 Indeed, all the sta- ple elements are there: the locked-room mystery, the damsel-in-dis- tress, Poirot’s superiority over ineffective policemen, and his unshaka- ble faith in his own abilities: when a lying suspect offers to tell the truth, Poirot replies: »I prefer, for the time being, that I tell you the

—————— 54 Bayard 2000, 54. 55 Ibd., 56. 56 Ibd., 40. 57 Bayard 2008, 67. 58 Continuation novels are sequels to a literary series which come with the official seal of approval of the author’s estate. Some authors (like Sebastian Faulks, who has written sequels to the James Bond series as well as a new Jeeves and Wooster novel) are particularly adept at this kind of »literary camouflage« and specialise in it. 59 Cf. Thompson 2014. As is customary for continuation novels, Hannah’s name ap- pears in far smaller letters than Christie’s on the title page.    63 truth, mademoiselle. Forgive me, but I find myself to be more relia- ble.«60 While the novel never really deviates from Christie’s established pattern (if anything, it even outdoes Christie with a scheme so outra- geously complex the reader has a hard time catching up), it occasionally questions the detective’s method and adds the one or other distinctly postmodern, self-reflexive bit of meta-fictionality. Not only does the narrator admit to his own unreliability, but it is Poirot himself who at one point suggests that his method borders on guess-work.61 By the end of the novel, though, we are back in more familiar territory: with Poirot monologising in front of his assembled audience and revealing the identity of the culprit, putting at rest all doubts regarding his abilities. Given the way it reveals itself to be somewhat torn between challenging the traditional paradigm and adhering to it, Hannah’s novel bears testimony to the persistence of the genre formula. Readers who are no longer content to merely admire the careful arrangement of Christie’s plot constructions from the stalls and who would much rather play a more active, emancipated role (on stage, together with the investigator, as it were), should seek out the more subversive proposi- tions by parodists or playful deconstructivist critics – and partake in rewriting Poirot’s adventures accordingly. I have attempted to outline some of the forms this may take: a critical view of the narrative setup and its dubious ideological proposition, a mockery of the quasi-divine detective figure whose competence is hardly ever questioned, a critique of his methodological approach, and (as so vividly demonstrated by Bayard’s work) an in-depth engagement with the text that goes beyond the »crossword puzzle« approach and that seeks out gaps and fissures. At the end of his most famous essay, Roland Barthes proclaimed rather emphatically that »the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author«62, and by the same token, the deconstruction of a genre that generally resists any kind of experiment »that threaten[s] to transgress or extend its boundaries«63 may produce more alert readers who will turn the tables on Hercule Poirot, for a change. —————— 60 Hannah 2014, 205. 61 Ibd., 277. 62 Barthes 2007, 316. 63 Lovitt 1990, 83. 64  

Works Cited

Barthes, R. (1990). S/Z. Oxford: Blackwell. — (2007). e Death of the Author. In David Lodge (Ed.), Modern Criticism and eory: A Reader. Harlow: Longman, 313–316. Bayard, P. (2000). Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? e Mystery Behind the Aga- tha Christie Mystery. New York: e New Press. — (2008). Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong: Reopening the Case of ›e Hound of the Baskervilles‹. New York; Berlin; London: Bloomsbury. Christie, A. (1935) [1934]. ree Act Tragedy. Leipzig, Paris, Bologna: e Albatross. — (1938) [1920]. e Mysterious Aﬀair at Styles. London: Penguin. — (1949) [1937]. Dumb Witness. London: Pan Books. — (1955) [1936]. Murder in Mesopotamia. London: Penguin. — (1977) [1938]. Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. London: William Collins. — (1980) [1933]. Lord Edgware Dies. London: William Collins. — (1987) [1926]. e Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Glasgow: William Collins. — (2001) [1936]. Cards on the Table. London: Harper. Ciocia, S. (2015). Rules Are Meant to Be Broken: Twentieth- and Twenty- First-Century Crime Writing. In C. Berberich (Ed.), e Bloomsbury In- troduction to Popular Fiction. London: Bloomsbury, 108–128. Conan Doyle, Arthur (2001). A Study in Scarlet (1887). London: Penguin. — (2008). Sherlock Holmes: Selected Stories. Oxford: OUP. Cook, C. (2013). e Agatha Christie Miscellany. Stroud: e History Press. Derrida, J. (1984). Signéponge/Signsponge. New York: Columbia UP. Ebert, T.L. (1992). Detecting the Phallus: Authority, Ideology, and the Pro- duction of Patriarchal Agents in Detective Fiction. Rethinking Marxism 5(3), 6–28. Finke, B. (1983). Erzählsituationen und Figurenperspektiven im Detektivro- man. Amsterdam: Grüner. Genette, G. (1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca; New York: Cornell UP. Ginzburg, C. (1980). Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scien- tiﬁc Method. History Workshop Journal 9(1), 5–36. Berlin: Wagenbach. Gutkowski, E. (2011). An ›Investigation in Pragmatics‹: Agatha Christie’s ›e Murder of Roger Ackroyd‹. Clues: A Journal of Detection 29(1), 51–60. Hannah, S. (2014). e Monogram Murders. New York: Harper Collins. Hühn, P. (1987). e Detective as Reader: Narrativity and Reading Concepts in Detective Fiction. Modern Fiction Studies 33(3), 451–466. Jann, R. (1995). e Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Detecting Social Order. New York: Twayne.    65

Lovitt, C.R. (1990). Controlling Discourse in Detective Fiction: Or, Caring Very Much Who Killed Roger Ackroyd. In R.G. Walker & J.M. Frazer (Eds.), e Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Con- temporary Literary eory. Macomb: Western Illinois UP, 68–95. Motte, W. (2011). Pierre Bayard’s Wormholes. Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature 35(2), 268–294. Peirce, C.S. (1979). Science and Philosophy. Cambridge; London: Harvard UP. ompson, L. (2014, Sep. 9). ›e Monogram Murders‹ by Sophie Hannah. e Guardian. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/09/mono gram-murders-sophie-hannah-hercule-poirot-agatha-christie-novel-re- view [10.01.2016]. Wagoner, M.S. (1986). Agatha Christie. Boston: Twayne. Wouters, E. (2011). e Detective’s Method: Abduction or Just Fiction? Se- miotica 137(1–4), 99–111. York, R.A. (2007). Agatha Christie: Power and Illusion. Houndmills; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Filmography

Fera, G.V. (director) (1996). »Murder on the Dis-Oriented Express« (Muppets Tonight, S1E8). USA. Mills, R. & Marshall, D. (director) (1993). »Hercule Yakko« (Animaniacs, S1E25). USA. Moore, R. (director) (1976). Murder by Death. USA. Stuart, M. (director) (1976). »Murder on the Oregon Express« (e Benny Hill Show, S7E3). UK. Tashlin, F. (director) (1965). e Alphabet Murders. UK.