The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The idea came to Agatha Christie from two directions. Her brother-in-law James Watts suggested a story in which the criminal was the Dr Watson figure, the person telling the tale. Then, in March 1924, Lord Louis Mountbatten wrote to her out of the blue with the same suggestion and some notes. She wrote in her autobiography that she thought it a remarkably original idea and worked out her own way of doing it.[1][2]

The novel ran first as a newspaper serial, in fifty-four parts in the London Evening News from July to September 1925, under the title Who Killed Ackroyd? William Collins published it in June 1926, the first Christie the firm issued, and Dodd, Mead followed in New York on 19 June. Collins remained her publisher for the rest of her life, and its successor HarperCollins publishes her still. The dedication is to Punkie, the family name for her elder sister Madge.[3][4]

The book made her famous and made some readers angry. Critics said the solution broke the rules of fair play. Dorothy L. Sayers answered that it is the reader's job to suspect everybody. In 2013 the Crime Writers' Association voted it the best crime novel ever written. It has been in the public domain in the United States since 2022 and can be read free at Project Gutenberg.[2][5]

Christie also said the doctor's sister Caroline was the beginning of Jane Marple. She wanted a sharp-tongued spinster who knew everything and heard everything, a complete detective service in the home. When the book was adapted for the stage as Alibi in 1928, Caroline was cut and replaced with a pretty young girl, and Christie never forgave the change.[2]

Dr James Sheppard lives in King's Abbot with his sister Caroline, who knows everything that happens in the village before it happens. Mrs Ferrars, a rich widow whose husband died a year before, has been found dead of an overdose of veronal. Caroline says it was suicide and says she poisoned her husband. Sheppard says nothing. He is a careful man.

Roger Ackroyd, the widower at Fernly Park, had meant to marry Mrs Ferrars. He asks Sheppard to dinner and tells him, alone in the study after the meal, that she had confessed to him. She had poisoned Ashley Ferrars, and afterwards somebody had blackmailed her for it. She had killed herself rather than go on paying. A letter from her arrives by the evening post, naming the blackmailer. Ackroyd wants to read it alone. Sheppard leaves at ten minutes to nine and, at the gate, meets a stranger asking the way to Fernly.

At a quarter past ten the telephone rings at the Sheppards' house. The caller says he is Parker, the butler, and that Ackroyd has been murdered. Sheppard drives back. Parker denies making any call. The study door is locked. Inside, Ackroyd sits in his chair with a Tunisian dagger from his own collection in his neck, and the letter is gone. The window is open, and outside are prints from a pair of shoes belonging to his stepson Ralph Paton.

Ralph has vanished. His fiancée Flora, Ackroyd's niece, goes next door to a retired foreigner who has taken the house called The Larches, and asks him to clear Ralph's name. He is Hercule Poirot, and he agrees on one condition: he will go on to the end, whatever the end is.

Everyone in the house had a reason. Flora and her mother were kept short of money. Geoffrey Raymond, the secretary, and Major Blunt, the big-game hunter, both owed money. Parker had once blackmailed a former employer. The parlourmaid Ursula Bourne had quarrelled with Ackroyd that afternoon and been dismissed. The housekeeper Miss Russell had asked Sheppard odd questions about drugs. Raymond and Blunt both heard Ackroyd's voice through the study door at half past nine, refusing a demand for money.

Poirot works with Sheppard as his Watson, and Sheppard writes it all down. A wedding ring is found in the goldfish pond. The stranger at the gate turns out to be Miss Russell's illegitimate son. Ursula Bourne proves to be Ralph's secret wife. Flora admits she never said goodnight to her uncle at a quarter to ten; she was taking forty pounds from his bedroom. Poirot notices that a chair had been pulled out from the wall in the study and pushed back. He asks how a man could have been heard talking at half past nine when the doctor says he left him alive at ten to nine, and what was in a small package the doctor carried that night.

Poirot calls the household together for what he calls a little reunion. He announces that Ralph Paton will walk in, and Ralph does. He tells them that he knows the murderer and that the murderer knows he knows, and that he will go to the police in the morning unless he is spared the trouble.