Alistair Rolls: Agatha Christie and New Directions in Reading Detective Fiction: Narratology and Detective Criticism. (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature). London and New York: Routledge, 2022.

• Sarah J. Link

This book offers a re-reading and alternative solutions to a number of Agatha Christie’s most popular detective novels and short stories. The book takes as its methodological starting point French critic Pierre Bayard’s detective criticism, which exposes flaws in the detective character’s solution to their case. By debunking the commonly accepted official solutions to well-known detective fiction stories, detective criticism aims to challenge scholarly opinions that treat the genre as formulaic and repetitive. Agatha Christie and New Directions in Reading Detective Fiction follows Bayard’s lead and “systematically seeks to read against the grain of the solution” proposed by the detective character at the end of a story. Unlike Bayard, Alistair Rolls proposes to do so by focusing on the beginning rather than the end of (Christie’s) detective stories. Employing “beginning-orientation” as a reading strategy allows a shift of focus to elements of the text that are mentioned early on but not taken up again in the official solution to the cases. All nine re-readings of Christie’s works proposed by Rolls in this book take their cue from details mentioned at the beginning of the stories, often before the investigation has even started.