The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie, 1926 ★★★★½

Murder Most Sharp

Diabolical is the word to describe this wonderful mystery novel, as twisted as a vine and as charming as a cuckoo clock. Those who might question the notion of a tea-cozy mystery blowing a reader’s mind (much like me, back when) will most likely enjoy this happy rebuke.

Critics have called this the best of the Christie novels; many place it in the top ten of crime fiction overall. In terms of mechanical skill, there’s nothing to argue with there. Nor will I do too much explaining, it being a matter of spoilers. More even than most mysteries, you have that issue here.

In a quiet English village, King’s Abbot, a wealthy widow named Mrs. Ferrars turns up dead one morning, an apparent suicide. This upsets the small community, particular the village’s other rich person, Roger Ackroyd. He invites local surgeon James Sheppard for dinner to discuss the matter. Sheppard manages to get only a little information, something to do with blackmail, before Ackroyd breaks off their meeting. Later that night, Sheppard gets a call. Ackroyd has been murdered!

Christie channels Sheppard setting the stage:

Ackroyd was sitting as I had left him in the arm-chair 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.

…I heard the butler draw in his breath with a sharp hiss. “Stabbed from be’ind,” he murmured. “‘Orrible!” He wiped his moist brow with a handkerchief, then stretched out a hand gingerly towards the hilt of the dagger.

“You mustn’t touch that,” I said sharply. “Go at once to the telephone and ring the police station…”

Neither the police nor Dr. Sheppard wind up leading the investigation to expose Ackroyd’s killer. Rather, it will be Sheppard’s new neighbor, a retired Belgian detective who has moved to England to try his hand at marrow-growing and leave crime-fighting behind. But just as there is no rest for the wicked, so too is farming no option for Hercule Poirot.

The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd was Christie’s third novel featuring Poirot. The cover of my 1969 Pocket Books paperback calls it “THE MOST FAMOUS OF THE HERCULE POIROT MYSTERIES.” This seems a reach considering the worldwide success of Murder On The Orient Express’s film adaptation a few years after the paperback’s printing. Still, it’s been a while since that film came out. Today’s crime-fiction critics rate Roger Ackroyd near or at the top of the genre.

Christie does some unusual things in this novel. One already alluded to is how Poirot himself comes into the case, after it is well underway and with little advance notice. He is introduced as “Mr. Porrott” by Dr. Sheppard, our narrator, who encounters Poirot for the first time when the detective tosses a summer squash over the wall separating their properties, then comes over the wall himself to apologize when the gourd lands at Sheppard’s feet.

Poirot’s first impression is thus disarmingly comic: “An egg-shaped head, partially covered with suspiciously black hair, two immense mustaches, and a pair of watchful eyes.”

Of course, Poirot uses this unprepossessing appearance to put people at ease while he investigates them. His manner of conversation is flip, at times foppish, but always suggestive of wheels grinding within wheels, several moves ahead of everyone else.

“It is completely unimportant,” he tells Sheppard regarding the position of a chair in the room where the murder occurred. “That is why it is interesting.”

Christie has a way of making murder seem almost fun. The murder itself isn’t played as a tragedy; you aren’t given a chance to know much about the victim other than he was a prosperous fellow with an active household. Moreover, there are plenty of comic elements. Sheppard’s unmarried sister and housemate Caroline is full of ideas about the case, showing zero discretion sharing them with anyone coming into her orbit.

“People ought to know things,” she tells her brother. “I consider it my duty to tell them.”

Sometimes Caroline is wildly off-base, other times it turns out she is more on point. I found myself eagerly anticipating her next appearance, and Dr. Sheppard’s exacerbated asides which follow.

1926 was a big year for Agatha Christie. In addition to publishing The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, she also initiated a divorce from her first husband and ignited a national furor when she disappeared for ten days, a matter which remains unexplained. Image from http://www.playbuzz.com/forreadingaddicts10/all-about-agatha-christie.

More than humor, there is wit. Christie juggles a lot of balls in this one, working various angles in such quick succession you need to read carefully to see where one tangent stops and another begins. There’s also the clever truth behind the murder, which works well enough in itself but even more if you do like I did and go back and read Roger Ackroyd again.

I even enjoyed the way red herrings and blind alleys are employed here. You get the feeling Christie was treating her novel like an elaborate train set, setting up endless loops and sidings in such a way that they not only make sense at the time, but, while easily forgotten after, hold up as logical developments when reviewed.

The absence of coincidence here was refreshing. In the prior Poirot novel, Murder On The Links, I counted three major ones which all impacted the story in a serious and contrived way. Either Christie got much better at her craft in three short years, or was just more inspired. Here the only coincidence I noticed was Poirot being there at all.

“It’s extraordinarily intriguing, the whole thing,” Sheppard marvels at one point late in the novel. “Every new development that arises is like the shake you give to a kaleidoscope – the thing changes entirely in aspect.”

I had but minor niggles with The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd. The secondary characters are picaresque but thin as cardboard. Also, you really need to be cool with Christie’s tea-cozy milieu, a succession of slightly formal conversations taking place in well-appointed drawing rooms.

Roger Ackroyd is a product of its time: Manners are proper, the class system is implicit, and a long section of narrative involves a tense game of Mah Jong between Dr. Sheppard, Caroline, and two characters you never see or hear from again. I’m sure Christie would have minded another crime novelist inserting a long baseball game in the last third of her story the same way I did that.

There are a lot of cool features in the book, at least the 1969 paperback version I have. There is a map of the Ackroyd estate; a floor plan of a wing of his house; another of the study where Ackroyd’s body is found; and, most impressively and typical of Christie, a listing out at the beginning of the cast of characters, 12 in all, including pages listed for each’s first appearance and a brief summary for why each makes for an interesting suspect:

Major Blunt – A courageous, cool-headed big-game hunter, he felt ill at ease in a world that wouldn’t let a man solve his problems with a gun…

Ursula Bourne – A tall, ladylike parlormaid, she seemed too perfect for the role she tried to play and the references she gave were disturbingly silent about the past…

Poirot may already have been a well-defined figure by 1926; in fact he was the only grace note I remember from reading Murder On The Links. He has his cocoa, twirls his moustaches, and stresses the importance of “little grey cells” in resolving questions. The only difference in this Poirot novel is the absence of his usual Watson, Arthur Hastings, who apparently has gone off to South America with the woman he met in Murder On The Links.

I hardly missed him. If you have to separate Poirot and Hastings, you can’t find a more memorable replacement companion than Dr. Sheppard. The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd is one of those novels that seems to have just about everything going for it, a masterpiece of precision, wit, and craft that even holds your interest when read a second time.