Between Genre, Parody, and Criticism: Gilbert Adair’s <i>The Act of Roger Murgatroyd</i>

Abstract With an amateur sleuth who is also a detective novelist and a murderer who turns out to be a parodist of crime fiction, Gilbert Adair’s postmodern parody of the British Golden Age whodunit, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (2006), encompasses a critical reflection on the genre in almost every formal and plot-related element. Yet, and this is where Adair’s approach differs from that of other postmodern writers, the text never abandons the conventions of the whodunit genre but merely takes up and heightens classic generic elements, among them self-referentiality, metafictionality, intertextuality, and parody. This essay examines the ways in which Adair’s exploration of postmodern concerns as to the artificiality not only of fiction but of reality builds and depends on generic structures and conventions rather than on subverting them, thereby demonstrating the potential, relevance, and interest of the Golden Age whodunit for postmodern thought and emphasizing the postmodern qualities which he identifies in the genre in general, and in Agatha Christie’s work in particular. (FM)