Friday, July 17, 2020

Book Review - Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
Published by: Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers
Publication Date: June, 1926
Format: Hardcover, 288 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

Dr. James Sheppard has just been attending to the suicide of one of his patients, a Mrs. Ferrars. This tragedy effects another patient, and friend, Roger Ackroyd, who invites Dr. Sheppard to dinner with his family and other house guests at Fernly Park that night. The dinner isn't the most congenial of affairs, the other guests include Roger's sister-in-law and her daughter Flora, who announces her engagement to Roger's stepson Ralph Patton, Major Blunt, a big game hunter, and Geoffrey Raymond, Roger's personal secretary. The guests wouldn't be that important if it wasn't for what happened after. Roger reveals to Dr. Sheppard that his fiance, the widow Mrs. Ferrars, killed herself because she was being blackmailed! She apparently killed her first husband and the blackmailer knew it! Before the two get into too great a discussion about what all this could mean a letter from the late Mrs. Ferrars arrives and Roger asks the good doctor to leave. Dr. Sheppard though is soon called back to Fernly Park as Roger Ackroyd has been found murdered! The police suspect Ralph Patton, but nothing adds up. The room was locked, the letter from Mrs. Ferrars is missing, the call Dr. Sheppard received telling him of the death can't be traced, a chair has been moved at the scene of the crime, what does it all mean? It means Poirot is needed and Flora calls him in. As luck would have it he has retired to King's Abbot to grow vegetable marrows and is now living next door to Dr. Sheppard. Poirot is glad to come out of retirement because Roger Ackroyd was his friend. Dr. Sheppard, being such an important witness to the crime, becomes Poirot's Watson; leading him through the events as they happened and writing down the case for posterity. What an honor to work with the great Poirot! What an honor to see if the great detective's little grey cells are still up to the task of catching a criminal or are only good for cultivating vegetable marrows.

Sometimes you just need a really good whodunit. I was reading a list of the greatest locked room mysteries and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd topped the list. Now I loved a good locked room mystery, and while I still think that technically A.A. Milne's The Red House Mystery might be the more locked of the rooms due to a window that the generators of this list seem to have overlooked, I will say that this Poirot outing was fun and unexpected in many ways. What I found most fascinating about The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is that this is only Poirot's third book, his forth if you count the short story collection, and Agatha Christie already has him retired to the countryside to raise marrows! If you're wondering what a marrow is it's a vegetable similar to zucchini, and yes, leave it to Poirot to grow something that the majority of modern readers have to look up because they are no longer fashionable. Though I think even contemporary American readers would probably have had to look it up as well... or at least that's my hope in a desperate plea to not feel totally ignorant about vegetables. Given that Poirot is the star of 50 short stories, 33 novels, and 2 plays, I was thrown that we see Poirot pleasantly ensconced in retirement. Of course it doesn't last, but the fact that Christie was willing to toy with the idea of retiring her greatest detective so early as a sort of red herring goes to show how she revolutionized the detective genre by continually playing with the medium and not hesitating to take a risk. And in another unexpected twist we aren't seeing Poirot through the hero-worshiping eyes of Hastings! We get an entirely new view of Poirot through the eyes of our unreliable narrator Dr. Sheppard. Which then makes one think if we can even trust Hastings' narration in his stories. There are just so many implications to everything here that it makes one dizzy. In fact I'd say Christie subverting the detective genre's and her own most common tropes versus solving the murder brings more joy to the reader; but that just might be me.

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