Acquitted of accusation: crime fiction belongs to literature. Dramatic Elements in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

The purpose of this thesis is to prove that crime fiction cannot be excluded from literature as opposed to the opinion of the anatgonists who argue that crime fiction does not belong to literature. The basis of my defense will be the supposition that if a type of crime novel, which is a collective term of its subgenres (detective story, thriller, spy story, etc.), shares common characteristics with one of the main literary genres, i. e. lyric, drama, epic, novel, and short story, it can be called a literary work. This statement will be justified by demonstrating how the general rules of the drama are manifest in the detective story The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie.