SANFORD PINSKER
Who Cares
If
Roger Ackroyd
Gets Tenure?
When Edmund Wilson, perhaps our century's most distinguished man of
letters, weighed in on the subject of contemporary detective fiction for
the pages of the October 14, 1945
The New Yorker
(he found it, in a word,
"disappointing"), a good many readers wrote back-some outraged that he
did not like what they passionately admired while others provided reading
li sts they hoped would change hi s rnind. So, Wilson (being Wilson) hun–
kered down with selected work by the likes of Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery
Allingham, and their assorted cousins. His conclusion, under the provoca–
tive title, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?"
(The New Yorker,
January 20, 1945), made it clear that he remained neither amused nor pre–
pared to say a single kind word on behalf of detective fiction:
I had often heard people say that Dorothy Sayers wrote well, and I felt
that my correspondents had been playing her as their literary ace. But,
really, she does not write very well; it is simply that she is more con–
sciously literary than most of the other detective-story writers and
that she thus attracts attention in a field which is mostly on a sub-lit–
erary level. In any serious department of fiction , her writing would
not appear
to
have any distinction at all.
Might the same things be said about the academic novel, that curious
species of fiction in which eccentricity and sheer pettiness combine
to
give
higher learning the satiri c pasting it so often deserves? Or is it the case that
nobody-other than professors, of course-gives a fig about whether or
not Roger Ackroyd gets tenure?
Depending on how loosely one defines the "academic novel," one
might argue that the general form is as old as Aristophanes's
The Clouds.
There, Socrates was held up to ridicule as a man riding through the heav–
ens in a basket; and the label of dreamy impracticality stuck not only to
him, but also to al l the befuddled academic types who have followed.
Caricature is, after all, the great leveler, a way of pulling down the vani–
ties of those we fear-whether it be the cackling scientist, the loony
