A few years ago, a brilliant small book on detective fiction appeared in France called Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? It got talked about at the time for demonstrating, rather neatly it was thought (by the then sitting tenant of this space in the LRB, Thomas Jones, among others), that at the end of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Hercule Poirot hit on a wrong solution to the crime, that the too devious Dame Agatha had for once thrown even herself off the scent. I was on the point of adding that, of course, this was the novel in which Poirot decided that the who who done it was the man telling the story - who thereby earned himself a star billing among the deceivers known to the theorists of fiction as 'unreliable narrators'; the 'of course' being as much as to say: 'you know that as well as I do because we've all read the book.'

LRB 22 March 2007 | PDF Download