The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

First published: 1926

Type of work: Murder mystery

Time of work: The early 1920’s

Locale: King’s Abbot, an English country village

Principal Characters:

• Hercule Poirot, a detective
• Dr. James Sheppard, the village doctor
• Caroline Sheppard, his sister
• Roger Ackroyd, a wealthy industrialist
• Ralph Paton, his stepson
• Mrs. Cecil Ackroyd, Roger Ackroyd’s sister-in-law
• Flora Ackroyd, her daughter
• Elizabeth Russell, Ackroyd’s housekeeper
• Ursula Bourne, his parlor-maid
• Parker, his butler
• Geoffrey Raymond, his secretary

The Novel

Set in the bucolic English village of King’s Abbot, the novel is narrated by Dr. James Sheppard, physician to the area’s leading residents, one of whom is Roger Ackroyd, a wealthy industrialist. Sheppard is a bachelor who lives with his sister Caroline, an elderly spinster with a bent for gossip. Ackroyd, a widower, lives with his widowed sister-in-law, the penurious yet proud Mrs. Cecil Ackroyd. Her daughter Flora is engaged to marry Ralph Paton, Ackroyd’s penniless and irresponsible stepson.

Shattering the usual calm are two deaths, seemingly connected only by proximity of time and place, but in fact directly related. First, Mrs. Ferrars, a wealthy widow, dies, presumably of an accidental overdose of veronal. (Her husband had died a year earlier, seemingly of acute gastritis complicated by alcoholism, though Caroline Sheppard thinks his wife poisoned him.) Roger Ackroyd is murdered the next night, stabbed in his study soon after Dr. Sheppard visited with him. The two men were friends, and during their last visit, Ackroyd told Sheppard that he and Mrs. Ferrars had planned to marry, but the previous day she confessed to having poisoned “her brute of a husband” a year earlier. What is more, someone knew of the crime and was blackmailing her. Ackroyd blamed himself for her suicide because he reacted to her revelation with repulsion and horror, instead of with sympathy, but he was “not the type of a great lover who can forgive all for love’s sake.... All that was sound and wholesome and law abiding in him must have turned from her utterly in that moment....” She asked Ackroyd for twenty-four hours before he reported her crime, and during this period she committed suicide. While he was telling Sheppard the tale, the butler brought in the evening mail, which included a letter from Mrs. Ferrars, presumably identifying her blackmailer. Ackroyd set it aside to read after Sheppard left. When the police search the room after Ackroyd’s death, the letter is gone.

In the aftermath of the murder, a newcomer to the village enters the picture. The Larches, a house next to that of the Sheppards, has been rented by an elderly foreigner, thought to be a retired hairdresser but actually Hercule Poirot, the Belgian private investigator, who knew Ackroyd and hoped to retire anonymously to King’s Abbot and cultivate vegetable marrows. Poirot, however, agrees to take on the case at the behest of Flora Ackroyd and works with the police in attempting to solve the mystery.

Poirot’s sleuthing determines that several people in the Ackroyd household stood to benefit from the man’s death: his sister-in-law; his niece; Geoffrey Raymond, his secretary; Elizabeth Russell, his housekeeper; Parker, the butler; and Ursula Bourne, the parlormaid. Mrs. Ackroyd and Flora had been totally dependent upon Ackroyd for financial support, which the man—wealthy though he was—provided grudgingly; therefore, an inheritance would lift a burden from each. Raymond is badly in debt and admits that the fortuitous legacy of five hundred pounds from Ackroyd came in the nick of time. Miss Russell had an illegitimate son (Charles Kent) who was a drug addict in desperate need of money, and she also once had delusions of marrying her master. Further, Poirot learns that Parker, the imperturbable butler, had blackmailed his former master; if Ackroyd had discovered this aspect of his butler’s past, Parker surely would have gone to any means to preserve his secret. Finally, Ursula Bourne “seemed too perfect for the role she tried to play,” had given—or had been given—her notice, and was the one member of the household whose alibi could not be confirmed.

Thus there is a plethora of suspects; chief among them for much of the novel, however, is none of the above, but rather Ralph Paton. Ackroyd, from whom he is estranged, thinks Paton is in London, but he actually is staying at a local inn. On the night of the murder, and at the time it presumably was committed, Paton was seen going toward Fernly Park, the Ackroyd estate; after the crime, however, he seems to have disappeared, and not even Flora knows his whereabouts. During his absence, the terms of Ackroyd’s will are revealed, and Paton is a prime beneficiary (as are Flora and her mother). In the course of his investigations, Poirot discovers that the engagement between Flora and Paton came about through Ackroyd’s matchmaking efforts and that the two were amenable only because they did not want to antagonize their potential benefactor.

With all the suspects on hand except for Ralph, Poirot pursues his quest for a solution, focusing primarily upon answering four questions: Who made the call to Dr. Sheppard that led to the discovery of the murder? Why was a chair moved in Ackroyd’s study after the murder? Were the bootprints outside the study window indeed made by Ralph Paton? Who owned the discarded wedding ring that Poirot found in the pond on Ackroyd’s estate?

When Poirot finally announces his solution to Dr. Sheppard at the end of the book, not only do the answers to these questions become known, but also the clues Agatha Christie has planted throughout the novel seem obvious. This is not to minimize the surprising, even startling, nature of the conclusion, for only the most astute reader is likely to have suspected Dr. Sheppard, the narrator and Poirot’s Watson, of having been the blackmailer of Mrs. Ferrars and the murderer of Roger Ackroyd.

The Characters

Typically for a traditional English whodunit, the book has a gallery of stereotypical characters commonplace to the genre. Roger Ackroyd is a standard victim: someone the reader scarcely gets to know before the murder, a man to whom the reader has formed little attachment. What little Christie tells about him is largely unfavorable: He is wealthy but stingy, and though he respects the law, he lacks compassion, even when it comes to the woman he plans to marry. Then there are the servants—Bourne, Parker, Russell—who have pasts they are trying to hide. In addition, there are family members who dislike the victim and would benefit from his death. For example, Ralph Paton, Ackroyd’s twenty-five-year-old stepson, is a dissolute gambler who is alienated from his father but dependent upon him for support. Mrs. Cecil Ackroyd and Flora also are dependent upon the largesse of a man they dislike and thus crave release from what they regard as a lamentable situation. Still another standard character-type present here is a mysterious stranger, Charles Kent, who is revealed to be connected to at least one person in the household.

The major characters in the novel are Poirot and Sheppard, and even they are stereotypical. The former is in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes: a self-centered, eccentric, but brilliant detective who utilizes his powers of ratiocination in order to solve crimes. A small but dignified man of advanced age, he speaks with a cultivated Belgian accent. Though he dresses impeccably, his head is his most noticeable feature. Here is Dr. Sheppard’s description when he first sees Poirot: “An egg-shaped head, partially covered with suspiciously black hair, two immense mustaches, and a pair of watchful eyes.” Dr. James Sheppard is to Poirot in this case what Dr. John Watson is to Holmes on many occasions: companion, confidant, and recorder. His personality makes him eminently suitable for his role, for he is discreet and reticent, a patient man of apparent probity; his profession of country doctor has made him the trusted friend of many in his community. As relaxation from his medical practice, Dr. Sheppard had only one noteworthy pastime: tinkering with mechanical objects. He puts this hobby to use in committing what he thought would be the perfect crime. Just before ending his life (like Mrs. Ferrars, with veronal), he writes: “A strange end to my manuscript. I meant it to be published some day as the history of one of Poirot’s failures! Odd, how things pan out.”

A peripheral character in the mystery is deserving of comment here: Caroline, Dr. Sheppard’s spinster sister. An affectionately portrayed comic figure whose inquisitiveness and rumormongering are unparalleled, she is a fountainhead of vital information, and even her baseless speculations sometimes prove to be useful. Miss Sheppard also may have served a more significant purpose for her creator, as the origin of Jane Marple, who makes her detecting debut in a 1930 novel, The Murder at the Vicarage. In her 1977 autobiography, Christie wrote: “I think it is possible that Miss Marple arose from the pleasure I had taken in portraying Dr. Sheppard’s sister in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. She had been my favorite character in the book—an acidulated spinster, full of curiosity, knowing everything, hearing everything: the complete detective service in the home.”

Critical Context

Agatha Christie published her first mystery novel in 1920: The Mysterious Affair at Styles: A Detective Story. Four more novels plus a collection of Hercule Poirot short stories followed in the next five years. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd came next, in 1926, and was immediately successful, a second impression being required within a few weeks. Its cleverly contrived plot alone would have assured at least a modicum of popularity, but having the Watson-like narrator turn out to be the murderer undoubtedly contributed to its popular appeal (as did the publicity surrounding Christie’s mysterious disappearance later in the year). Others had used variations of the device prior to Christie, but hers is the most fully realized, and it was controversial. One attack was by Willard Huntington Wright (who wrote whodunits as S. S. Van Dine). In 1927, he dismissed her trick as “hardly a legitimate device” and claimed that the denouement “nullified” whatever was good about Poirot’s work in the novel. His objections were echoed by Ronald A. Knox, also a whodunit writer, who in 1929 said that “the criminal must . . . not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow” and “the Watson . . . must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind.” Coming to Christie’s defense was critic and crime-fiction writer Dorothy L. Sayers; in 1928, she said of Wright’s objection:

  I fancy [his] opinion merely represents a natural resentment at having been ingeniously bamboozled. All the necessary data are given. The reader ought to be able to guess the criminal, if he is sharp enough, and nobody can ask for more than this. It is, after all, the reader’s job to keep his wits about him, and, like the perfect detective, to suspect everybody.

The critical controversy notwithstanding, the appeal of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd has withstood the passage of time, and its reputation as a tour de force is undiminished.

Bibliography

Barnard, Robert. A Talent to Deceive: An Appreciation of Agatha Christie. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1980. Barnard counters literary critics who attack Christie as unsuccessful in high “literary” terms by examining possible cultural, formal, and literary-historical reasons for her enormous popularity. Barnard, himself a renowned mystery writer, presents simultaneously critical appraisal and readerly appreciation.

Fitzgibbon, Russell H. The Agatha Christie Companion. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1980. A basic survey of the history of the mystery genre and Christie’s position in it, the book also contains a bibliography, a short story finder, and a character index to the novels and stories.

Gill, Gillian. Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries. New York: Free Press, 1990. One of the few writers on Christie to take a clearly feminist critical stance, Gill combines biography with social and literary critical theories to examine the career of Christie as a working woman writer and the ways in which her works, though generally not reflective of feminist politics, astutely portray middle-class women’s realities in modern Britain.

Reddy, Maureen T. Sisters in Crime. New York: Continuum, 1988. Reddy examines how women writers, including Christie, redefine crime fiction through their approaches to ideas of crime as well as through the use of women crime solvers, often using and overturning stereotypes of women to fool readers.

Riley, Dick, and Pam McAllister, eds. The Bedside, Bathtub, and Armchair Companion to Agatha Christie. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979. A lively, casual compendium with synopses of all Christie’s novels and plays. Includes historical illustrations and articles on recurring themes and characters in Christie’s works, English customs and settings, and film adaptations.

Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder. New York: Viking Press, 1985. A sweeping, thoroughly detailed account of the development of crime fiction throughout the twentieth century, mainly in Britain and the United States, which puts Christie in a critical and historical context with her contemporaries in the genre.