Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong by Pierre Bayard Read Free Book Online Page B

conviction that Oedipus killed his
     father. The theory elaborated by Freud would of course not collapse if the Greek hero were proved innocent, but it would not
     emerge entirely unscathed, either. While some specialists in mythology such as Jean-Pierre Vernant have long expressed doubts
     about the “Oedipal” nature of the criminal act—a term that depends on an anachronism—the reinterpretation offered by Goodhart
     and Felman goes farther: it calls into question the very existence of the crime itself.
    These studies were a revelation for me. My only reservation was that they had opened a path of research but did not go far
     enough. The American critics were content to point out the improbabilities in Sophocles’ text, and went only as far as suggesting
     that Oedipus did not necessarily kill Laius. So their approach was simply negative. But they didn’t undertake to go on to
     the obvious next step, the constructive one: to solve the mystery disclosed by their reading by unmasking the real murderer.
    So the main difference that separates detective criticism not only from other studies based on investigation, but also from
     the rest of literary criticism is its interventionism . While other methods are usually content to comment on texts in a passive way, whatever scandals those texts might present,
     detective criticism intervenes in an active way, refusing to go along. It is not content with pointing out the weaknesses
     in texts and casting doubt on presumptive murderers; it boldly risks any number of consequences by actually looking for the
     true criminals.
    The main premise of detective criticism is this: many of the murders narrated in literature were not committed by the people
     accused by the text. In literature as in life, the true criminals often elude the investigators and allow secondary characters
     to be accused and condemned. In its passion for justice, detective criticism commits itself to rediscovering the truth. If
     it is unable to arrest the guilty parties, it can at least clear the names of the innocent.

    Having arrived at this theoretical premise, it made sense to flesh it out. Agatha Christie offered a favorable field for research,
     both because of her eminence in the realm of the detective story and also because of the literary quality of her work. It
     would have been all too easy to show that unpunished criminals lurk inside books not originally conceived of as detective
     novels.
    To make the demonstration even more convincing, I decided to work on Christie’s book The Murder of Roger Ackroyd , regarded as a masterpiece of precision. * This novel draws its celebrity from the fact that the murderer is the narrator. Through entries in his journal, the narrator,Dr.
     Sheppard, tells how he gets involved with the investigation that the detective Hercule Poirot is conducting into the murder
     of the village squire, Roger Ackroyd. But, according to Poirot, the doctor leaves out of his story the fact that he himself
     is the criminal—that it was Sheppard who killed Ackroyd, to keep him from publicly accusing Sheppard of being a blackmailer.
     In the final pages of the book, the triumphant Poirot turns to Sheppard, accuses him of committing the murder, and encourages
     him to commit suicide.
    The nice idea of having an investigation narrated by the murderer himself ensured the book’s fame, but at the same time ignored
     a whole series of concrete problems. I won’t go over all the contradictions in the text here, but no serious investigator
     today can blithely accept Hercule Poirot’s conclusions. In short, the ingenuity of the narrative device distracted readers
     from the only question that matters for detective criticism—one possibly more prosaic than reflections on literary effectiveness,
     but more in keeping with ethics: Who in fact did kill Roger Ackroyd?
    To take a simple example of the problems the text presents, the presumed murderer, Dr. Sheppard, in order to give