The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

This bestseller of 1926 ensured that mystery writing and detective fiction would never be the same again.  Christie broke the traditional barrier between writer and reader, the “fourth wall,” completely baffling the reader until near the end when Hercule Poirot indicts the storyteller himself.  The shock waves were felt far beyond the world of detective fiction.

More revolutionary than Ulysses, it poisons the traditional relationship between the writer and the reader.  Academics and intellectuals may still try to seduce students with the pleasures of the text, and claim that Ulysses was subversive because it was banned for its sexual content, and sophisticated because of its language play, but in Roger Ackroyd Christie was crass and vulgar by all the acceptable conventions of good taste and literary merit upheld by the smart set.  Her storyteller deliberately deceives the reader without actually lying and when your subversion avoids being elitist, then you are truly a revolutionary.

Like Christie herself, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot are consistently underestimated.  They win by concealing their true natures and their secret thoughts from criminals, readers and viewers.  They hide in plain sight. 

In that sense they are quite the opposite of comic book crime-fighting superheroes like Zorro, Batman, Superman and Spiderman who apparently need to hide behind different physical identities in order to preserve their anonymity. That's a recipe for schizophrenia, which is why superheroes always have psychological problems...