The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

 The Book

    Hercule Poirot is back, but instead of Captain Hastings narrating the book, we have Dr. James Sheppard. In it we pick up our narrative on the morning of the titular Roger Ackroyd's murder. Dr. Sheppard was called to pronounce the death of a lady in practice, Mrs. Ferrars, probably by suicide, although Dr, Sheppard has no idea why.  Saddened by the event, he nonetheless goes to dinner with his friend Roger Ackroyd, a middle aged man who is applying pressure to his niece (Flora Ackroyd) and stepson (Ralph Paton) to marry each other and keep his money in the family when he dies. Once Dr. Sheppard arrives at the house, Ackroyd confides to Sheppard he knows why Mrs. Ferrars committed suicide. Given the sensitivity because Mrs. Ferrars was still in mourning for her late husband, a secret engagement existed between them. Now that her mourning had passed, Ackroyd was eager to get married and to announce it to his family and friends. Mrs. Ferrars confesses to him she killed her late husband because he was a negligent, abusive old man and she loved Ackroyd. Somebody found out, and is blackmailing her. Ackroyd, horrified, left her house to reconsider their engagement. Now, with Mrs. Ferrars dead, Ackroyd believes he owes his love the least of his loyalty, and engages Dr. Sheppard to help him find and out the blackmailer. Dr. Sheppard, having a long day, and with a patient who could deliver a baby at any moment, leaves the Ackroyd estate for home shortly before nine PM. 

    Once he arrives home, his sister Caroline demands all of the gossip from his friends, but before they can get into it, a call comes in. Ackroyd answers, expecting it to be his maternity patient, but it's someone claiming to be Ackroyd's butler to begs Dr. Sheppard to come because Ackroyd was murdered. Dr. Sheppard arrives, find the door is lock and knocks down the door with the butler to find Ackroyd has been stabbed in the back and is dead. A careful timeline establishes the murder likely took place between 9:45 and 10:15. Because the window to the terrace is opened, it is speculated that Ackroyd's stepson is the murderer. Flora, aghast at the suggestion, find the newest member of the neighborhood, Mr. Porrott, who Dr. Sheppard believes to be a retired barber. Porrott is of course, the enimitable M. Poirot. Hearing Flora's distress, Poirot agrees to put his little grey cells to use and pursue the truth to the bitter end. 

My Thoughts

MAJOR SPOILERS

    This is Agatha Christie's first book with William Collins & Sons. It is a touch shorter than her two previous books clocking in at 213 pages. The change of publishers does several things. While Bodly Head felt no need to translate Poirot's occasional lapse into French, William Collins & Sons does footnote a few of the longer phrases. In fact, Poirot speaks in full French sentences in this book.

The set up of this book is positively brilliant, although is it not the first time she has had the murderer as one of the narrators. She tried this out to much effect with the journal entries of the Hon. Eustace Pedler, MP in The Man in the Brown Suit, this is the first time we get to see the working of one Hercule Poirot through the eyes of a murder. And like Captain Hastings, Sheppard is a bit clueless as to how the great genius works. We are presented with a man who is the consummate professional, polite, circumspect, and good humored. 

    But Sheppard is as drawn in by Poirot as the readers are, finding it impossible to resist the Belgian's charm. Sheppard is a smart man, a very smart killer, and still, he is confused, falls into Poirot's traps, and is in all ways lesser than Poirot. I believe that Hastings reputation as being dim witted was a critique young Christie took to heart, and in such she provided us a beguiling narrator who is smart.

    I know a few people find it hard to believe in the retirement of Poirot, to the country of all places! And they find him a bit shoehorned into this narrative. But I am not sure, having read through the Poirot cannon in order to date, that this observation is fair. First of all, let us examine how many Poirot novels had been written to this point. Just two, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and Murder on the Links. We know Christie has updated the mystery genre, taking murder and double crossing from the teaming streets of overcrowded London, where anything could happen to a person, to the seemingly tranquil setting of the country house. Where decent people live. The 1920s version of a wealthy suburb. When Poirot came as a refugee from The Great War to England, notice he did not originally settle in London, but with other Belgians in the tiny town of St Mary, where he was hosted by Mrs. Inglethorpe, the former Mrs. Cavendish, the owner of Styles. 

    It is only later, when Poirot is earning his living as a private detective that he lives in London with Captain Hastings. Even then, Poirot jumps at the chance to go to a client in the middle of rural France. So the supposition that Poirot is more at home in London, is a little ridiculous. 

    Now that Hastings has married and moved to Argentina, Poirot returns to the countryside to live out the rest of his days in his new adoptive country. In this way, Christie is acknowledging the passage of time and Poirot's age. Very reasonable, if we believe Poirot was too old to be in The Great War, making him at least 50 when fled Belgium, that would make him newly arrived at age 50 in 1916 (the year Styles is set), and he has aged in real time that would make him 60 the year this book was published, and giving him a minimum of 8 extremely successful years as a P.I., then in both age and preference, I believe he is where he was meant to be. 

    All in all, this is a very intriguing book where I can see the work Christie did with her ideas in earlier books begins to come together. She is at last allowing herself to stretch out in an idea and bring it fruition.  

How Much My Library Card Saved Me

    As you can tell by the above photos of the library books I checked out, this is another one of the leatherette edition books still available at my library. I really love these books. They are well read at my library, yet gently so. After nearly 40 of reading, many, many of these books are still in our collection. Not only that, despite the occasional smudgy page where a grubby finger read the book, or the slight penciled in correction to the text, they are still holding up. The binding is fantastic. And until the paper begins to fall apart, I believe this book has many years of use ahead of it. 

    Now as with others in like this book, we have to do a bit of math to arrive at how much the book cost. I checked it out of the library with Michael Connelly's The Black Box. I save a total of $52.99 on that receipt. The Black Box costs $27.99 so a bit of subtraction brings us to $25. Clearly the more popular the book, the more the publisher charged for this edition. This book also has me crossing the cumulative total of $300

This Book                                       $25.00

This Summer                                $310.00