Pierre Bayard

In his latest book, La vérité sur "Dix Petits nègres" (Minuit, 2019) Pierre Bayard totally questions the solution delivered by Agatha Christie to the outcome of his novel. His entire book is therefore the counter-investigation that must restore the truth: we find in fact the procedure he already used in Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?  and in Sherlock Holmes was wrong: attempts to rectify certain fictional police investigations that he considers unlikely. And he proposes to come back to a new literary misunderstanding and shed light on a mystery that no one has solved, not even Agatha Christie. The novelty this time being that he lets the real murderer of the And Then There Were None speak for himself to lead us to the only acceptable solution.

His books have been considered as cases of "novelistic criticism," in that they present revisionist readings of famous fictional mysteries. In his 2008 book L'Affaire du Chien des Baskerville, for example, published in English as Sherlock Holmes was Wrong: Re-opening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles he analyzes the famous Sherlock Holmes case, and in his earlier book Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? he re-investigates Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. His book on Hamlet argues that Claudius did not kill Hamlet's father,... In these essays on Agatha Christie, Shakespeare and Conan Doyle, he engages in real literary counter-investigations, studying the motivations of the characters, highlighting the inconsistencies of the intrigues and humorously showing that fictional characters escape their creators.

Bayard's most popular book Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus (Minuit, 2007) (How to talk about books you haven't read) is a bestseller in France in which he engages in a study of the different ways of not reading a book, and recommends solutions to be able to talk about it anyway. Assuming that some readers have a terrifying understanding of reading, he tries to make them feel free from guilt for not having read canonical literature. The essential thing in culture being to have an overview, he claims the possibility of having a perforated and incomplete culture. Pierre Bayard has renewed this system in Comment parler des lieux où l'on n'a pas été, a work in the second degree again, in which he reviews the authors who have spoken of places they have not visited.

Pierre Bayard (born 1954) is currently Professor of Literature at the University of Paris 8 and psychoanalyst. He is the author of many creative essays such as Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? (2002), How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read (2007), and Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong (2008).