Golden Age of Detective Fiction

Dr. James Sheppard, our narrator, resides with his sister Caroline in the quaint English village of King’s Abbot. He recounts the events that unfolded after the suicide of Mrs. Ferrars, a wealthy widow who, a year after her abusive husband’s death, took her own life. Caroline suspects Mrs. Ferrars of poisoning her husband and believes her suicide to be an act of remorse.

The plot thickens when Roger Ackroyd, a wealthy widower from Fernly Park, urgently summons Dr. Sheppard for dinner. Among the guests are Major Blunt, Mrs. Cecil Ackroyd, her daughter Flora, and Geoffrey Raymond, Ackroyd’s personal secretary. Flora confides in Dr. Sheppard about her engagement to Ralph Paton, Ackroyd’s stepson, kept confidential for unknown reasons.

During a private conversation after dinner, Ackroyd discloses to Dr. Sheppard that he was engaged to Mrs. Ferrars, who confessed to poisoning her late husband. She was being blackmailed and promised to reveal the blackmailer’s identity within 24 hours. As they discuss, Parker, Ackroyd’s butler, interrupts with a letter Mrs. Ferrars posted before her demise, which Ackroyd opts to read alone, apologizing to Dr. Sheppard.

Moments after returning home, Dr. Sheppard receives a phone call reporting Ackroyd’s death. Rushing back to Fernly Park, he discovers Ackroyd murdered in his study, the incriminating letter missing, and footprints leading in and out of the room through an open window.

Ralph, now missing, becomes the prime suspect due to matching footprints. Flora, convinced of Ralph’s innocence, implores retired detective Hercule Poirot to investigate.

Accompanied by Dr. Sheppard, Poirot scrutinizes the crime scene, noticing a displaced chair. Through questioning, Poirot uncovers a tangled web of relationships and motives. Ultimately, he exposes Ralph, who was secretly married to Ursula, the maid, and arranged a rendezvous in the garden. Flora’s alibi crumbles, leaving Raymond and Blunt as the last to hear Ackroyd alive. Blunt admits his love for Flora.

In a final revelation, Poirot confronts Dr. Sheppard, revealing him as the blackmailer and murderer. Sheppard, fearing exposure, killed Ackroyd and staged the crime scene to implicate Ralph. Poirot advises Sheppard to spare his sister from the disgrace and consider ending his own life.

Accepting his fate, Sheppard finishes writing his account of Poirot’s investigation, culminating in an Apologia serving as his farewell and confession before taking his own life.

The Review

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is Hercule Poirot’s fourth case and one of his most beloved novels, with good reason. The book begins with a comic tone, Poirot is finally growing his often-talked-about vegetable marrows, and it is not going well. In a fit of despair, he accidentally throws one of the worst specimens over his garden wall and into Dr. James Sheppard’s lawn; Poirot, attempting to keep a low profile, is unsuitable, awkward, and cagey at first blush but soon falls in with the amiable doctor Sheppard, who starts the novel as a facsimile for Captain Hastings.

My suspicions were raised immediately by Christie’s decision not to have Hastings be in the story but to have someone functionally the same as Hastings in character, manner, demeanor, and deductive reasoning, so why not just use Hastings? Christie tries to wave away my suspicions by saying that Hastings is busy on his farm in South America- but as the author, she has the power to put any character in her books, so it felt deliberate. Why not Hastings? Why this twin, who is so Hasting like that? Poirot commented on it several times in the book. This is significant, I think.

Dr. Sheppard’s folksy demeanor is well complimented by his shrewd and gossipy older sister, Caroline, who loves keeping her eye on everyone and being “in the know” about everything. She has her pulse on the latest juicy gossip- why Mrs. Ferrars killed herself; she is wholly committed to the theory that Mrs. Ferrars maliciously poisoned her husband to marry again and patently believes that Ralph Paton is an innocent young man. While I think Caroline is mainly played for laughs due to her wild assertions made with complete conviction- she is a good judge of character, Caroline knows people a little too well for her own good, and she is her brilliance that is occasionally obscured by her brash nature that makes her such good friends with Poirot. He can easily take her information about village life and separate truth from her petty fiction.

Unlike Caroline, Dr. Sheppard is on the scene where all the strange things are happening in Little Abbott. He attended Mrs. Ferrars before and after her death; he was in the house. He observed Ralph Paton’s peculiar behavior before his inexplicable flight from King’s Abbott, and he is in Roger Ackroyd’s study with him before his death and is his confidant and is charged with helping him avenge Mrs. Ferrar’s death if anything happens to Ackroyd. He is appropriately in the soup and is now Poirot’s chronicler and closest confidant, feeding him the ins and outs of the nature of King Abbott’s principal players in this drama.

Trusting the right person is a central theme of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Did Roger Ackroyd trust the right person to take up his blackmail investigation? Did Ralph Paton trust the right woman with his heart? Did he trust the right person to hide him away? Is Caroline Sheppard’s feeling about her fellow villagers to be trusted, or are Dr. Sheppard’s unbiased facts a better and most trustworthy appraisal of what’s going on in King’s Abbott?

Christie has primed the pump for us to trust Dr. Sheppard, she has made him in Captain Hastings image and we have grown to trust and even love Captain Hastings in the previous adventures of Hercule Poirot. He is honest and brave and his devotion to telling the tale as it happened, even with his own feeble attempts at working out crimes, is legendary.

After all, the chronicler is there to bolster the hero, to flatteringly record their genius, and to be not quite as clever as them. From Anna Katharine Green’s Mr. Raymond to the iconic Dr. Watson to the affable Captain Hastings, the chronicler is primarily a function of the story; they are crafted to fulfill the whims of the hero, and they are not characters with their own will, motives, and secrets.

Until they are.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is iconic because, baked into the formula of a good mystery, the duo investigating the crime are both on the side of justice. Christie has spent the last three books adhering to this model and building up the rapport between Poirot and Captain Hastings so that it is easy for the reader to transfer their affections for Hastings to this facsimile, and that is the trap Christie has so deftly laid.

Dr. Sheppard is an unreliable narrator, and it is done so delicately and plotted so well that even though I cottoned on from the start, I marveled at how skillful he was at pulling the wool over so many people’s eyes. I had everything worked out as I went along. Still, doubt grew on my part until I remembered Poirot’s special attention on Caroline and some of the barbs she had thrust under Dr. Sheppard’s skin, which were so subtle that they could be taken as sibling jealousy, but I thought not.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a master class in sleight of hand. Don’t get too focused on the drama surrounding Ralph Paton, his angry father, his love triangles, his weak alibi, his mysterious flight, and his continued disappearance. These are smoke and mirrors. Exciting and thrilling and wholly convincing and nothing but razzmatazz.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd asks the reader to put aside what they came into the story “knowing” and to pay attention to what Hercule Poirot is paying attention to; Christie, on numerous occasions, asks the reader to see what Hercule Poirot sees and the way she gives away the whole game- of not just how The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is solved, but how Poirot solves all his cases. The only problem is that she’s such an entertaining writer that most of the time, we don’t want to see what Poirot sees; the circus she creates is much more fun and the reason we return to her books repeatedly.