Postmodern Murder at the YMCA Camp

 This afternoon, Sunday, Ginger wanted to go down to the main lodge at the YMCA camp. While she went inside to buy ice cream at the general store, I found a pair of the comfortable wooden chairs on the outdoor deck and waited for her return. We proceeded to spend the next three hours sitting there in leisure as the scores of other guests went by us, or played in various activities in the sprawling lawn that descends from the lodge.

The view of the mountains was better than yesterday, when the air quality was so bad. Ginger couldn't stand to go outside from the smell of smoke. It is all coming from the fires in northern California. Denver had the worst air quality in the world yesterday.

For much of the time I was absorbed in reading most of the last chapters of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which is the third of Agatha Christie's novels, published in 1926, and is largely cited as the one that made Hercule Poirot famous as a fictional detective.

Throughout much of the story I had began to see why it was so highly rated (or so I thought). It is in many ways the perfect classic detective story set in an English mansion with a mysterious butler and a suspects hanging out in a billiard room. There are doctors and colonels, servants and widows. It felt like the inspiration for the board game Clue.

Like I said, I thought I knew why it was so popular. But if you've read the book, you know that it has a huge twist in the solution, one that was no doubt revolutionary in literature at the time. It is no exaggeration that this novel, in which Christie has found her form, is a landmark of Postmodern literature in respect to the use of the narrator, in a way that evokes later  works in that category such as Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov and Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. As a landmark in detective novels, it is right up there with The Moonstone and The Hound of the Baskervilles. 

I could write more, but it would be in danger of providing too much information to someone who hasn't read it, and certainly one of the pleasures of this novel would be in the surprise of the twist. Yet I would probably read it all the way through again, just to experience the clues to the solution that I missed. That latter part is what makes it great literature, I believe.

When I finished, I imagined what it must have been like for Christie to have had the inspiration for the twist ending. It must have hit her one day, and I can imagine her telling other folks the secret. Or not. Did she make everyone read her book to find it out? That would be very much of what actually happened in the story. Super Postmodern!

As for me, the narrator of this blog, we have a couple more days here. There have certainly been a few twists while we have been here, some of which I cannot discuss here. They will have to be a mystery.