Drowned Hopes

Poor little Wally Trehern had warts. All the other children would tease him, and they were such ugly things to look at that people tended to avoid him. But when he met the Green Lady, something odd happened. The Green Lady told Wally to wash his hands with water from a nearby spring, and that if he truly believed his warts would go away, they’d go away. The odd thing is that the warts did go away overnight. And when Miss Cost, a chronic asthma sufferer, declares that the same spring cured her of her asthma. And as soon as the media gets ahold of the story, the miraculous Pixie Falls become a sensation.

A few years pass, and the miraculous healing powers of the spring attract many visitors. There’s the odd reported cure, but there are many people who walk away from the spring no better off than when they started. When the land on which the spring stands is inherited by Miss Emily Pride, she decides to put a stop to the whole thing. But the island dwellers have prospered due to this sudden Pixie Falls boom, and they resent Miss Pride’s intrusion. A few anonymous threats later, after an attack on Miss Pride, Roderick Alleyn arrives on the scene to protect Miss Pride, an old teacher of his. But it may be too little too late, as the situation soon escalates into murder.

Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? : The Smackdown

A Quick Word of Introduction: I originally wrote this piece back in March, submitting it to an online publication. Unfortunately, there seems to have been a major delay in the publishing of the next issue. Being infamously impatient, I have at last decided to publish this essay on my blog to share with my readers. I have made a few more-or-less minor revisions and have added images. In this piece, I tackle Edmund Wilson's infamous essay Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? using all the tools Wilson used, particularly sarcasm. Throughout my analysis I will challenge the claim that this essay "destroyed" the typical Agatha Christie mystery by claiming the precise opposite: it is an entirely useless essay from a critical standpoint. And so, without further ado, I give you:

Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? : The Smackdown

Edmund Wilson, Professional Troll

As a university student, I was seriously tempted to sign up for a course in Detective Fiction last term. What made me decide otherwise was seeing the book list: there was no Agatha Christie nor Raymond Chandler, and in fact, all the books were contemporary. Not only was the selection highly limited, it gave no sense of the genre’s rich and varied history from what I could tell… my fears were confirmed when I found out that one of the readings for the course was Edmund Wilson’s infamous essay Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?

But why is it famous? As I recently discovered on a re-read, Wilson’s essay contains literally nothing of substance. He only proved one thing: Edmund Wilson did not like detective stories. Which is a perfectly valid point of view. But Wilson did not substantiate it even remotely. He simply looked down at the genre through the eyes of a “true intellectual” and sniffed at it. In other words, Edmund Wilson was a troll.

Santa's Slay

I have read only one Ngaio Marsh novel to date, and that was Death of a Fool/Off With His Head. It had a lot of good things in its favour—particularly an intriguing impossible crime—but the book was pretty uneven as a whole. Much of it was good but other parts were laughably obvious or just not very interesting. The detective, Roderick Alleyn, wasn’t repulsive, but he wasn’t particularly memorable, either. In fact, the most memorable point of the book was the work that went into the production of a traditional English dance. The question is, could Marsh improve when I approached her for my second dose of Alleyn, in the late book Tied up in Tinsel?

Tied up in Tinsel is a book about a very rich man, Hilary Bill-Tasman, who has an obsession for the past. He repurchases the old family home, tracks down old furniture and paintings and repurchases them, and plans to restore the house in general. But to do that and to maintain it, he needs servants. But where is one to find servants in the 1970s? Why prison, of course! More specifically, the entire staff is composed of murderers who have left their penitentiaries behind. This is seen as a form of rehabilitation… but things get very awkward when somebody begins to play malicious pranks recalling the murders that the staff had committed years ago! And it’s even worse when an unpleasant butler disappears after having played the role of The Druid (aka Santa) for the local children at Christmastime…

Talking about Talking About Detective Fiction

I’d like to welcome readers to this special edition of At the Scene of the Crime, in which I’m joined by a very special guest: Curt Evans, mystery scholar extraordinaire and author of a soon to be published book on “Humdrums”, authors from the Golden Age like John Rhode who are often dismissed despite their importance in the genre’s history.

It seems ironic, now that I think about it, that Curt’s agreed to join me and examine P. D. James’ Talking About Detective Fiction, which is a book that examines the mystery genre. I’ve taken good-natured cracks at P. D. James on the blog before. I haven’t read any of her books, but their size frankly scares me—in the wrong hands, one of her books would make an admirable bludgeoning weapon. But just how well would the Baroness analyse that noblest form of literature, the mystery? The only way to find out would be by reading the book…

Curt, thanks for joining me!

Perhaps I should start by saying that I found this book could be charitably called a train-wreck. I disagreed often with Julian Symons throughout Bloody Murder, but with P. D. James, I rarely got the chance to agree! Her history of the genre is highly selective, going from Jane Austen to the Crime Queens to a cursory glance at modern day, with barely a glance at anything else in between! The entire non-hardboiled American school of writing is treated as a non-entity, as though it never existed! John Dickson Carr is lucky to escape with a mere half-sentence acknowledging him as master of the locked-room mystery, while Helen McCloy, Anthony Boucher, Ellery Queen, and S. S. Van Dine are never mentioned!

James also has a curious fixation on Ronald Knox’s “Commandments” of Detective Fiction, treating them as though they were the only set of rules ever written. Van Dine’s Commandments are never mentioned, for instance, and James gets things horribly wrong when she writes: “Rules and restrictions do not produce original, or good, literature, and the rules were not strictly adhered to.” Did you hear that, Bill Shakespeare? You and your silly sonnets are neither original nor good, because you restrict them to 14 lines! The only rule you can really apply to detective fiction is for it to play fair with the clues, which I don’t see as a problem: it’s simply something that defines the genre.