"Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?"

      In his 1945 New Yorker article called "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd," (the title of a mystery novel by Agatha Christie), the American literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote: "The reading of detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking."

      Mr. Wilson (1895-1972) was not an Agatha Christie fan, nor a lover of crime fiction. He was, in that regard, a literary snob. Today, 48 years after his death, only a few literary professors know his name. However, millions of people around the world still read Agatha Christie.