Book Review: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) by Agatha Christie

“They’ve just found Roger Ackroyd murdered” (45).

With The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the “Queen of Mystery” Dame Agatha Christie presents her seminal work, perhaps the most comprehensive challenge to a mystery reader’s natural proclivity and prejudice for a certain type of trustworthy character –it delivers one of the most shocking twist-endings in the whodunit murder-mystery genre. Apparently, the idea for the novel was given to Christie in a letter written by Lord Mountbatten, or at least that is what Lord Mountbatten contended for many years. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd forces us to ask, who do we actually trust? Which characters manage to slip beneath our suspicions? The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was first serialized in the London Evening News in 1925 as “Who Killed Ackroyd?” It is a remarkably self-aware novel. Many of the characters in the book talk about detective novels –almost as if they are aware they are living inside one—and our narrator is acutely aware of Poirot’s past cases which have apparently been documented by Captain Hastings (it was news to me that characters in the Poirot novels can actually read the Poirot novels). This challenge posed to narrative literary standards by Agatha Christie reminded me a great deal of the early postmodern tradition in Western literature, stretching back to Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Thus, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a remarkably innovative –even revolutionary– novel that broadened the boundaries of the murder-mystery genre.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the first novel in the Poirot series not to be narrated by Poirot’s dullard sidekick, Captain Hastings. Instead, it is told from the first-person perspective of Dr. James Sheppard, a mechanically-minded small-town surgeon who has received a “legacy” (inheritance) but lost much of it speculating on a gold mine in western Australia. He lives with his flighty, gossipy sister Caroline in the rural English village of King’s Abbot. The next nearest town is Cranchester, located some 9 miles away. King’s Abbot is a village filled with idle chatter, few residents are able to successfully keep secrets: “Able-bodied men are apt to leave the place early in life, but we are rich in unmarried ladies and retired military officers our hobbies and recreations can be summed up in one word, ‘gossip’” (7).

There are two main aristocratic country houses in King’s Abbot –King’s Paddock, which is owned by the widowed Mrs. Ferrars; and Fernly Park, which is owned by Roger Ackroyd, a country squire of sorts who made his wealth as a successful manufacturer of wagon wheels, he is the “life and soul” of King’s Abbot. The novel opens with the announcements of the death of Mrs. Ferrars on the night of the 16-17 of September. Notably, her husband Ashley Ferrars had died just over a year prior (some in the village have suspected Mrs. Ferrars poisoning her husband, but Dr. Sheppard believes it was simply a case of acute gastritis brought on by “habitual overindulgence in alcoholic beverages”). But now Mrs. Ferrars has died of an overdose of Veronol which she was allegedly taking for sleeplessness. It also comes to light that she was carrying on a secret affair with Roger Ackroyd, a man who was once married to a widow with a child who then tragically drank herself to death and left him with the seven-year-old boy to raise as his own –now, the boy has grown into a twenty-five-year-old man. His name is Ralph Paton.

“’The essence of a detective story,’ I said, ‘is to have a rare poison –if possible something from South America, that nobody has ever heard of—something that one obscure tribe of savages use to poison their arrows with. Death is instantaneous, and Western science is powerless to detect it…’ (14-15).

One evening, our narrator Dr. Sheppard is summoned to meet with his friend and confidante, Roger Ackroyd, to discuss Mr. Ackroyd’s perception that his house is falling apart as Ralph Paton has abruptly returned to King’s Abbot and Roger Ackroyd has received a blue envelope containing a letter from Mrs. Ferrars shortly before she died. In it, she shares a secret that someone has been blackmailing her over the death of her late “brutish” husband. Dr. Sheppard presses Mr. Ackroyd to read the letter, but Mr. Ackroyd refuses, so Dr. Sheppard returns home. On the way, he bumps into a strangely familiar figure outside the gates to Fernly Park and when he arrives at home, while tuning his clocks, Dr. Sheppard receives a mysterious call announcing the death of Mr. Ackroyd. Apparently in shock, Dr. Sheppard rushes back to Fernly Park to find that none of the staff at the house issued the phone call, and they have been entirely unaware of Mr. Ackroyd’s death.

What happened here? Who killed Roger Ackroyd? And how did he die? The “weaselly” Inspector Raglan from Cranchester is placed on the case, along with Inspector Davis and Colonel Carter (the chief constable), but a surprising figure spontaneously turns up in the story as Dr. Sheppard’s neighbor –Dr. Sheppard mispronounces his name as “Mr. Porrot” at first and mistakes him for a “retired hairdresser,” but we know of him as the incomparable Belgium detective, Hercule Poirot. He has recently retired from work and retired to King’s Abbot where he now focuses his time on gardening. “Why, he’s Hercule Poirot! You know who I mean –the private detective. They say he’s done the most wonderful things –just like detectives do in books. A year ago he retired and came to live down here. Uncle knew who he was, but he promised not to tell anyone, because M. Poirot wanted to live quietly without being bothered by people” (72). In one particularly interesting anecdote, Poirot is described has having solved a baffling murder that threatened both Prince Paul of Mauretania and a dancer he married who turned out to be a Russian Grand Duchess, one of the Czar’s daughters who managed to escape (this was published as a 1923 short story entitled “The King of Clubs,” and later featured in the 1974 compilation Poirot’s Early Cases).

Captain Hastings, whose name occasionally pops up in the novel is amusingly and unflatteringly remembered as full of “imbecility” and “stupidity” and “naivete” by Poirot (in turn, Hastings has apparently called Poirot a “human oyster” in the past). Hastings has now relocated to the Argentine, and thus does not make an appearance in this novel (the familiar Scotland Yard Inspector Japp is also briefly mentioned and does not appear in the book), but Poirot is still the same little genius we have come to know, albeit perhaps slightly more arrogant here than in previous novels. Using his “little grey cells” and famous “method,” Poirot carefully examines all the clues and interviews all the suspects in the case in his “study of human nature.” The chief suspects are:

• Ralph Paton: Roger Ackroyd’s stepson who stands to inherit money and is angry with his stepfather’s attempt to arrange the marriage to Flora Ackroyd. Ralph suddenly disappears after Roger Ackroyd’s death.   
• John Parker: Roger Ackroyd’s anxious, nosy butler.
• Flora Ackroyd: Roger Ackroyd’s niece, daughter of Roger Ackroyd’s ne’er-do-well brother Cecil. She has been weighing her proposed “business arrangement” marriage to Ralph Paton (she is in need of money), even though she loves Major Hector Blunt.  
• Major Hector Blunt: a friend of Roger Ackroyd, a big game hunter who is initially described as a “woman-hater” but who is secretly in love with Flora Ackroyd.
• Geoffrey Raymond: Roger Ackroyd’s secretary.
• Miss Elizabeth Russell: Roger Ackroyd’s longest-serving housekeeper.   
• Ursula Bourne: a parlourmaid at Fernly Park.

Some of the clues Poirot investigates include: an open window in Roger Ackroyd’s study with footprints, a smoldering fireplace, the nearby chair with Ackroyd’s body, the dagger in his back (a curio given to Ackroyd by Major Blunt from Tunis), a dictaphone, a scrap of handkerchief, and forty pounds missing from Mr. Ackroyd’s room. Throughout the story’s twists and turns we are treated to a panorama of life in the little English village King’s Abbot –we join Dr. Sheppard at a Mah Jong party, and various local establishments like The Larches, Three Boars, and the Dog and Whistle bar, all while Dr. Sheppard serves as a stand-in for Captain Hastings in assisting Poirot’s effort to solve the mystery…

“I know the murderer of Mr. Ackroyd is in this room now. It is to the murderer I speak. Tomorrow the truth goes to Inspector Raglan. You understand?” (269).

So, who killed Roger Ackroyd?

Solution (Spoilers Ahead)

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I previously read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd many years ago and thus was very much aware of its famous twist-ending. In re-reading the book this time, I picked up on many subtle clues dropped by Agatha Christie throughout the novel like the following:    

• Dr. Sheppard’s comments from being in the room with Ackroyd: “The letter had been brought in at twenty minutes to nine. It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread. I hesitated with my hand on the door handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had left undone. I could think of nothing. With a shake of the head I passed out and closed the door behind me” (43).
• After leaving Ackroyd’s room, Dr. Sheppard claims the following: “Ackroyd was sitting as I had left him in the armchair before the fire. His head had fallen sideways, and clearly visible, just below the collar of his coat, was a shining piece of twisted metalwork” (49).
• Dr. Sheppard admits to making up a “slightly fictitious account of the evening” to satisfy his sister Caroline.

Early on in the novel, Poirot suspects Dr. Sheppard of bending the truth. And as the novel progresses, we start to doubt the trustworthiness of our narrator. However, many characters in the novel have secrets they have been hiding: Flora Ackroyd stole money from Roger Ackroyd, a drunken Liverpoolian named Charles Kent who comes under suspicion after visiting Fernly Park is actually Miss Russell’s illegitimate child, Poirot concocts a false story of having a mentally unsound he is caring for, and Ursula Bourne the parlourmaid is revealed to be Ursula Paton, otherwise known as Mrs. Ralph Paton.

But who among these suspects actually committed the murder? Poirot notes the murderer is: “A person who was at Three Boars earlier that day, a person who knew Ackroyd well enough to know that he had purchased a Dictaphone, a person who was of a mechanical turn of mind, who had the opportunity to take the dagger from the silver table before Miss Flora arrived, who had with him a receptacle suitable for hiding a dictaphone –such as a black bag—and who had the study to himself for a few minutes after the crime was discovered while Parker was telephoning for the police. In fact –Dr. Sheppard!” (278).

Our expectations are entirely subverted as we are confronted with an unreliable narrator –we can no longer trust our sole guide in this story! The murderer is revealed to have actually been Dr. Sheppard the whole time. He was blackmailing Mrs. Ferrars and then lost most of the money in a speculation scheme. It was he who killed Roger Ackroyd and walked around the house into the study window leaving muddy footprints along the window sill. And the call to Dr. Sheppard’s house announcing the death of Roger Ackroyd was actually made from a patient, a steward on an American liner. He was instructed to call Dr. Sheppard from the train station. Of course, the voices heard in Dr. Sheppard’s study was made via Dr. Sheppard’s use of a dictaphone set to go off at nine-thirty like an alarm clock (Dr. Sheppard is regularly tuning clocks and building little mechanical inventions). Lastly, Poirot invented the story of his alleged mentally unwell nephew in order to locate Ralph Paton who has been hiding in a mental nursing home at the behest of Dr. Sheppard. Poirot unveils this whole scheme to a room full of suspects in his trademark dramatic flair, though he keeps the culprit’s name confidential to the public, only revealing it privately to Dr. Sheppard afterward. Poirot then grants Dr. Sheppard the opportunity to kill himself and avoid public scandal which would surely drag down his sister Caroline, as well.   

In a concluding apologia, Dr. Sheppard says this has been: “A strange end to my manuscript. I meant it to be published some day as the history of one of Poirot’s failures! Odd how things pan out… I suppose I must have meant to murder him all along… My greatest fear all through has been Caroline. I have fancied she might guess. Curious the way she spoke that day of my ‘strain of weakness’… Well, she will never know the truth. There is, as Poirot said, one way out…” (283-286).

In an act of poetic justice, Dr. Sheppard decides to kill himself with Veronal just like Mrs. Ferrars and he sends his manuscript to Poirot to be dealt with privately with Inspector Raglan. He closes with the following bitter remark before committing suicide: “But I wish Hercule Poirot had never retired from work and come here to grow vegetable marrows” (286).

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Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, NY, NY, 2020 (originally published 1926).

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was dedicated to “Punkie who likes an orthodox detective story, murder inquest, and suspicion falling on everyone in turn!”

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