The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Roger Ackroyd is stabbed in his study in the village of King's Abbot, the evening after a widow's suicide and a hint of blackmail. Hercule Poirot, supposedly retired and growing vegetable marrows next door, investigates.

Dr James Sheppard, the village doctor, narrates and acts as Poirot's assistant, in the role Hastings usually occupies.

A retired detective, a village, and a narrator who has taken the assistant's chair.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The solution provoked a genuine controversy in 1926, with some critics arguing Christie had cheated. The consensus since is the opposite: every necessary fact is on the page, and the misdirection is achieved by omission and emphasis rather than by falsehood.

It is the standard example used to teach the difference between withholding and lying in a mystery, and it is why the book is studied rather than merely read.

The argument it caused is the reason it is taught: it withholds without ever lying.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Christie's technique is to let the reader's assumptions do the work. The narration is scrupulously accurate throughout; what it does is decline to mention things at the moments when mentioning them would be natural.

Re-reading is a different book, and it is designed for that. Almost every chapter contains a sentence that is doing two jobs.

Widely voted the best crime novel ever written by the Crime Writers' Association, and the one that established Christie's reputation beyond the genre.

It should not be the first Christie read if you already know the solution — and the solution is among the most spoiled in literature, so approach unspoiled if at all possible.

The novel's notoriety rests on a device many readers felt was a cheat, and the defence is textual: every fact needed is on the page, the misdirection is achieved by omission of the kind any narrator makes, and the sentences in question are literally true throughout. Christie plays fair by a narrow definition and knows exactly how narrow it is.

Nothing in it is false. A great deal of it is arranged.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

King's Abbot is drawn with real economy in a handful of pages — the gossip network, the doctor's sister who knows everything before anyone tells her, the fine social gradations between the big house, the professional class and the servants. Christie establishes that information travels instantly and unreliably in a small place, which supplies both the comedy of the opening chapters and the precise conditions the crime requires in order to work.

The narrator's sister, who extracts and redistributes everything worth knowing in the village without appearing to leave her own sitting room, was described by Christie as the character she most enjoyed writing in the book. She is a clear ancestor of Miss Marple, and the idea that a provincial spinster with no official standing might be the superior intelligence in the room effectively begins here.

He has moved to the village to grow vegetable marrows and does so badly, which is the joke the book opens on. Placing him as a neighbour rather than an official investigator changes the social dynamics of every interview and is part of why the novel feels closer than the others.

Members of the Detection Club argued at length over whether the device broke the genre's implicit rules, and some contemporary reviewers called it an outright swindle. The dispute contributed directly to the formal codes of fair play that writers drew up in the following years. The book is therefore partly responsible for the very conventions it is now usually described as having violated.

Its solution is so widely known that many readers arrive already spoiled, and it survives this better than expected: the pleasure shifts to watching the construction, and the second read is where the craft becomes visible. If you do not know it, avoid every introduction and most blurbs.