As Dame Agatha well knew, readers love surprises. The Twilight Zone, presented by Rod Serling, again played with viewers’ expectations, mixing oddities with surprise. The surprise was inevitable, yet he still fooled many of his audience. Whether The Murder of Roger Ackroyd incited the formation of the fair-play oath is unknown, but the furor over her use of that particular literary device continues today.įast forward to a nation riveted to their black-and-white television screens wide-eyed with anticipation as Alfred Hitchcock unfolds yet another story with a surprise ending.
The club members swore an oath to adhere to a code of ethics in their writing to grant the reader a fair-play chance to guess who did it before the end.
It served as a model and inspiration for Mystery Writers of America. Christie and other famed crime-writers formed The Detection Club, which exists today. She succeeds masterfully.įour years later, Ms. In this novel, she crafted her story with word choices that could fairly be read two ways, with the character both innocent, and then revealed as guilty. Short story writers know and follow this habit of making each word able to work hard, because of low word count requirements. Christie’s word choices were immaculately spare. The pacing may feel slow compared to today’s need for speed, but you’ll find Ms. But I advise writers to read the book twice, first without knowledge, and another time while knowing its secret.
In the rare case that the reader has not read this novel, I won’t reveal the ending. The story’s startling ending gained for her novel inclusion into Howard Haycraft’s list of important and/or groundbreaking detective stories (from Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story). (To me that’s a curiosity, because in this story he’d already retired to the country.) The novel was published in 1926, early in her career, and was merely the third time Hercule Poirot, her Belgian private investigator, had been called upon to use his little grey cells. Like many good stories, Dame Agatha Christie’s novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd developed from an idea tossed off playfully by two of her friends. This is the second in our member-written series: My Favorite Golden Age Mystery.
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