Agatha Christie. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. 1926. The Agatha Christie Collection, Create Space, 2019.

I read recently that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was voted the best mystery novel of the Twentieth Century by a committee of 600 mystery writers. Wow! One could modify Ecclesiastes 12:12 by saying, “Of the making of mystery books there is no end.” If this is considered the best, it must be really good!

A few years ago I directed a staged version of Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution. The students in the play were very good about keeping the ending a secret. I took my hint from the film version of the story. Actors in the film version were not given the last eleven pages of the script until the day of filming those lines. After one of the school performances, an audience member came up to me and told me she felt like she had to take notes. The end was such a surprise that she still wasn’t 100% sure how it all worked together.

That’s Christie at her best.

It is likely that few people unless prepped beforehand will figure out who murdered Roger Ackroyd. The village of King’s Abbot had something of a scandal because a widow in town had apparently committed suicide. Then “country squire” Roger Ackroyd is killed.

Our narrator is one Dr. Sheppard, the village physician and friend of Ackroyd’s. He is single and lives with his spinster sister Caroline. The business of everyone in town interests her.

Sheppard discovers that a relatively new neighbor is none other than Hercule Poirot. The famous detective has retired. He found King’s Abbot appealing because nothing ever happens there. Naturally, the local inspector ropes him into the investigation. Sheppard becomes friendly with him and even calls himself a Dr. Watson to Poirot’s Holmes.

The last person to see Ackroyd alive in his library saw him at 9:45 in the evening. No one else came into or left the room, and he was dead by 10:00 p.m. All the household staff had alibis.

Sheppard is an effective narrator. No, he is not omniscient, but, thanks to his sister, he is alert to town gossip and there are many people who could be suspects. Sheppard, though, becomes directly involved because he gets a phone call from someone calling himself Ackroyd’s butler saying Ackroyd has just been murdered. He hurries back to the Ackroyd mansion. But when he gets there, the butler denies making the phone call, and the room containing Mr. Ackroyd’s body is locked from the inside. Sheppard figures Ackroyd had been dead about half an hour when he arrived back at the Ackroyd mansion at 10:30.

Another mystery concerns the murder weapon. It is a fancy Tunisian dagger which Ackroyd kept in a display case. Sheppard had visited earlier for dinner and heard the case being opened. After the murder, it was found still open.

Ackroyd had a number of staff members including a butler, maids, and a personal secretary. They all could have done it. Rumors were that the housekeeper Miss Russell and Ackroyd had had a fling at some point, but when Roger’s single sister came to live with him after he was widowed, that relationship ended. He was also linked to Mrs. Ferrars, the widow who had just committed suicide. There also may be some other things going on with some of the other maids in the house. John Parker, the butler, and Geoffrey Raymond, the secretary cannot be ruled out.

But the main suspect is Ralph Paton, Roger Ackroyd’s stepson. He was popular and good looking but careless with money. He was at the house in the evening but then went to a local tavern and never came home. Indeed, he disappeared, and no one seems to know where he went.

There are many complications. Ralph is engaged to Flora Ackroyd, Roger’s niece. This was arranged by Roger, and while the couple have some respect for each other, there does not appear to be any love. Also present at the Ackroyd house the evening of the murder is an old friend and well-known big game hunter Hector Blunt.

Mostly, though, we observe Hercule Poirot through Sheppard’s eyes. Poirot is clever. He speaks an entertaining Franglais. It helps if the reader knows some French, though the overall mystery does not require it. Towards the end, Poirot assembles all the suspects—a common mystery meme—but surprises everyone, including this reader. To say much more might get into spoiler territory.

Still, there are some interesting things to note. The book was first published in June of 1926. In December 1926, Mrs. Christie famously disappeared for eleven days shortly after Mr. Christie asked for a divorce. When she was located, she was apparently suffering from amnesia. To this day, no one is sure where she was or what happened in that week and a half. I could not help thinking of Ralph Paton’s disappearance.

I hope it is not much of a spoiler to say that I suspect that James Patterson’s The Beach House may have been inspired by The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. In turn, Roger Ackroyd may have been inspired by Castle Rackrent, the famous Gothic novel from 1800. Jay Gatsby compares his own house to Castle Rackrent in the 1924 Fitzgerald novel. And so it goes. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is an original, but Ecclesiastes 1:9 also tells us that there is nothing new under the sun.