1.8 The Case of Dr. Sheppard's Asterisks

Let us consider a fundamental rule of the game between mystery author and reader. Our criminal and civil laws are based, at least theoretically, on a social compact among the citizens governed by those laws. Mystery stories, especially classic stories, reproduce this same arrangement between reader and author.

Authors and readers of mysteries universally agree on the rule concerning fair play, and this consensus suggests most clearly the social compact that exists between mystery author and reader. The author and reader trust each other to follow the rules but simultaneously acknowledge the existence of friendly competition. "It is a hoodwinking contest, a duel between author and reader," insists John Dickson Carr (himself a famous mystery author, under this name and a variety of pseudonyms) in an article he entitled, significantly, "The Grandest Game in the World" (The Mystery Writer's Art, 1970, 230).

The author and reader operate according to the assumption that the voice of the author is trustworthy and that the narrator may underemphasize certain important clues or misdirect the reader, but does not lie. Dorothy Sayers explains the rule thus: "That the writer himself should tell a flat lie is contradictory to all the canons of detective art" (Sayers, "Aristotle on Detective Fiction," Unpopular Opinions, 1946). As a logical extension of the social compact that exists in the fictional exchange between reader and author, the narrator, associated closely with the voice of the author, is presumptively excluded as a suspect in the crimes, even though he or she may be a character in the drama.

In Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), however, the narrator, an obvious Dr. Watson type, is in fact the murderer. At the end of the novel, the narrator-murderer goes to great lengths to absolve himself, not of his crimes, to which he almost cheerfully admits, but of violating the trust of the reader. That crime, his tone implies, would be much worse than murder. "I did not lie to you," his explanation suggests, "I simply did not tell I was the one who committed the murder."

Many contemporaries of Christie, especially other British mystery authors, felt that leaving out those asterisks represented a gimmicky violation of the rule of fair play or a solecism of an even worse kind. The social nature of the rule it violates, I think, inspired the furious responses. The parlor game takes its name from the room of the house, which is both intimate and public, a place for the family to play among themselves and also entertain guests. Cheating undoes the trust upon which such intimate relationships are founded and the honor with which the family presents itself to the public. Christie's innovation was felt to be, in that quintessentially British phrase, "not quite cricket."

Christie, in the voice of the narrator above, argues that her plot twist is not actually a fundamental departure at all, not cheating, but simply a very clever, absolutely fair, authorial tactic in the game between author and reader. "I am rather pleased with myself as a writer." Sayers, in the article I cited above, exonerates Christie, pointing out that the reader who trusted Dr. Shepperd on a prima facie basis is guilty of faulty logic: "So, despite the existence of a first innocent Watson, we may yet admit the possibility of a guilty one; nor, when the Watson in Roger Ackroyd turns out to be the murderer, has the reader any right to feel aggrieved against the author -- for she has vouched only for the man's Watsonity and not for his moral worth" (188). The maneuver belongs to the practice of constant innovation of the plot that occurred in the Golden Age, the development of ever more novel methods of murder, unlikely murderers, unusual motives, etc. of which Christie was an acknowledged leader. Ackroyd can be condemned only for the degree of its deviance, not for the deviation itself.

Nonetheless, many readers drew the line between innovation and violation right where those telltale asterisks should have gone.