1st Edition
Agatha Christie and New Directions in Reading Detective Fiction Narratology and Detective Criticism
This book brings a new lens to the work of Agatha Christie through a series of close readings which challenge the official solutions by Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.
This book's approach interweaves two core ideas: first, it explores the importance of French critic Pierre Bayard’s self-styled ‘detective criticism’; second, it takes detective criticism in a new direction by refocusing on the beginnings of Agatha Christie’s novels. In this way, the book counters the end-orientation that has traditionally dominated the reading experience of, and critical response to, detective fiction by exploring the potential of the beginning to host other interpretations and stories. Offering a new way of reading detective fiction, this book is a mixture of narratology and detective criticism, and deploys it in the form of radical new readings of a number of Christie’s most famous works.
This illuminating text will interest students and scholars of crime and detective fiction, literary studies and comparative literature.
Introduction Part I: Beginnings and Other Fabulae 1. Murder on the Orient Express and/or The Mysterious Affair in Syria 2. Anti-Beginning and the Ragged Edge of ‘The Witness for the Prosecution’ 3.Telling Ghost Stories: Hallowe’en Party Part II: Other Bodies in the Library 4. The Dreams of The Body in the Library 5. The Truth of The Body in the Library and The Murder at the Vicarage 6. Dead Man’s Folly: Reanimating Dead Bodies and Desires Part III: Following in Bayard’s Footsteps 7. What Caroline Said to Me: Alternative Living Arrangements in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd 8. When the Landscape’s Whitening: And Then There Were None 9. Curtain: Saving Judith, Once and Again 10. Conclusion
Biography
Alistair Rolls is Associate Professor of French Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He has written monographs on Boris Vian, French crime fiction and fetishism as critical praxis.
‘I can say without any equivocation that this is one of the most brilliant, exciting, and most ground-breaking studies of crime fiction I have read in the past 20 years (and that all serious scholars of the genre need to read) and one that promises to bring welcome and renewed interest to Agatha Christie and to Christie scholarship.’
Professor Andrew Pepper, Queen’s University, Belfast, Ireland.
