Was Agatha Christie a good writer? The American critic Edmund Wilson was one of the unhappy few who thought not. In 1944 he wrote a famous essay on Christie whose contentious (and contemptuous) tone can already be inferred from the rhetorical question which its title poses: ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’.
That title, in fact, could not have got it more hopelessly wrong. Surely Wilson was capable of understanding that, of course, nobody cares who killed Roger Ackroyd. That’s the point, for goodness’ sake! Agatha Christie irrelevant? Of course she is, but that again is precisely the glory of her work (relevance we can get at home) and it’s why the recent attempts of naive television adapters to make it ‘relevant’, by saddling poor Miss Marple with a ‘past’, for example, betray a dismaying miscomprehension of how Christie’s whodunits function.
Just pronounce her name.
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