De moord op Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

In a murder mystery, the genre Christie perfected, the object is for the reader to have fun attempting to solve the murder along with the detective – too lengthy a diversion into the reality of murder would detract from this fun. This makes the murder a fascinating and interesting mystery, rather than a tragedy, which serves the genre Christie is writing in.

How does Christie achieve this lightness, and what purpose does it serve?Ĭhristie forgoes detailed descriptions of the murder victim and lengthy explanations of characters’ grief in order to focus instead on clues about the murderer and details about all the suspects. 285)).Īlthough the novel contains murder, blackmail, drug abuse and suicide, there is nevertheless a lightness to its tone. Only some are true criminals, and even those criminals are not sociopaths, but rather desperate people, or simply regular people with a “strain of weakness” in them (as Dr. While all the characters of the novel have secrets, they are not all criminal – rather, they are human. The question is less whether or not someone has secrets, but more the extent of those secrets and the lengths they will go to to guard them. Regardless of the cause, deceit, the novel argues, is a natural human impulse. Sometimes, as in the case of Ursula Bourne or Major Blunt, that deceit is born out of love, and other times, as in the case of Parker, that deceit is born out of greed. By having every character be guilty of some offense, committed for love, money, greed, anger or revenge, the novel implies that people are by nature deceitful. The novel suggests deception is a universal truth. What does the novel say about deceit by having so many “guilty” characters? Almost everyone in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd has something to hide.

De moord op Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie