Cade presented a considerable degree of proof, not successfully vitiated by Thompson's Poirot-like delvings into rail timetables. He came to the conclusion that the episode was deliberately plotted to punish her erring husband. But Jared Cade, treated in very hostile fashion by Christie's family, and now by Thompson, looked elsewhere. Those who have had the imprimatur of the Christie family and been granted access to the family papers, such as Janet Morgan, have been very charitable towards the writer. The incident provides a test case for her biographers. This and other critical comments are included in Laura Thompson's detailed biography, which also uses many excerpts from Christie's own writings to fill gaps in the hidden inner life of her subject. Poirot can be accepted as an enabling device, with no anguished search for depth of character.Ĭhristie's references to drug addiction among ex-soldiers, and to a sharp divide between wealth and poverty, have contemporary resonances, and many commentators would agree with Francis Wyndham that her books can be viewed as a form of animated algebra. Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) now seems a very modern text, with a narrator of positively Barthesian unreliability. Yet somehow it is Wilson himself who is outdated in the postmodern literary world, where narrative has returned and the power of plot is once more acknowledged. Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?' asked the critic Edmund Wilson in 1944.

Max mallowan and agatha christie