Review of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD is regarded as the best murder mystery ever. How dare I trash the most popular crime story of the Queen of Mysteries, Dame Agatha Christie? Pardon me if I hurt many Agatha Christie fans. I have nothing against the author or her works. Indeed, I have read many of her books and seen a few movies. Liked them all. A great, great crime mystery writer.

But this novel, THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD, hasn’t done justice to her stratospheric reputation. I must write how I feel about the author fooling us readers. Excellent writing, I must say, in all respects – story, style, characterisation, suspense, technical point of view, et all – except for one serious flaw, fooling the readers deliberately and at every point in the story.

Let me explain, but before that the story in short. It is not in the sequence in which it is presented in the novel. The book is written from the first-person point of view (POV) of Dr Sheppard who turns out to be the murderer himself. (That is disclosed as the greatest surprise in the end.)

The book begins with Mrs Ferrars’s death due to an overdose of sleeping drugs. A year earlier, she had poisoned and killed her husband and had got away with it. Dr Sheppard, who had done the inquest knows the real cause of Mr Ferrars’s death and blackmails the wife and extracts money for a whole year. In the meantime, a rich widower, Roger Ackroyd, proposes to marry Mrs Ferrars. She dangles between turning down and accepting the proposal, while the blackmailer’s demand is on the increase. Finally, she can take it no more and commits suicide taking an overdose of sleeping drug. She has however posted a letter to Mr Ackroyd explaining her situation, and the name of the person who was blackmailing her.

The day the letter reaches Ackroyd, he is murdered. In comes the detective Hercule Poirot. There are several suspects, chief among them is Ralph Paton, the stepson of Roger Ackroyd. The story hurtles with spellbinding suspenseful situations (hats off to the creative ingenuity of the author). Finally, the mystery is solved by the famous detective. He lays bare the complicity of Dr Sheppard, who admits his guilt and takes his own life.

My reaction to such a file mystery is of angst that a great author has gone against the basic rule that a writer you must not cheat the reader. Come to think of it: the murderer is narrating and writing out the entire story and not mentioning anything about his own actions or his mind. It is not right; I feel strongly about it.

Take the exact moment of the murder of Roger Ackroyd. He has just received the letter from Mrs Ferrars with the name of her blackmailer in it. He starts to read it in his study with only Dr Sheppard present. He reads half and decides to read the remaining part of the letter when he is alone. I produce verbatim the next two paragraphs as narrated by Sheppard, the killer:

Now Ackroyd is essentially pigheaded. The more you urge him to do a thing, the more determined he is not to do it. All my arguments were in vain.

The letter had been brought in at twenty minutes to nine. It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread. I hesitated with my hand on the door handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had left undone. I could think of nothing. With a shake of the head I passed out and closed the door behind me.

Readers have every right to know what the first-person narrator sees, does, hears or thinks. Here the narrator (the murderer also) omits to mention what he did between 20 minutes to nine and ten minutes to nine, which is he killed Ackroyd and left him. It is nothing but cheating the reader, letting the reader down. There has got be a reason why the narrator omits his actions during that time, especially when that action is a pre-meditated murder and central to the story. It is not as though the narrator is speaking to some other character in the novel and therefore does not mention all his actions to that person. Here he is speaking to the reader, and I can see no reason why he should speak what happened before and after the murder but speak nothing about his striking with a dagger.

This omission would have been acceptable if it were a third-person narration by someone who was watching through a keyhole, or eavesdropping outside the door and was unable to see all the actions of the killer.

This is not the only place where Agatha Christie has cheated the reader. Almost on every account, she has indulged in the-fool-the-reader act. Take, for instance, Miss Flora Ackroyd’s claim that she has seen her uncle (Roger Ackroyd) alive at 9:45 pm. Our narrator (the killer as well) shows no reaction as to how she could have found Roger fine and alive, when he had himself killed him before 9:00 pm. He should have been puzzled. I agree that he was clever enough not to show any outward reaction to it, but, at least, within he should have felt shocked and surprised about why Flora was telling a lie. But that does not happen, yet another instance of fool-the-reader act. The story is replete with such acts by the narrator.

The narrator is the man-Friday to Poirot who has taken him to assist him in his investigation, much like Hastings and Poirot is her other mystery novels or like Watson and Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, Dr Sheppard says as much: I played Watson to his Sherlock. He accompanies him everywhere and records all his investigations. Imagine Watson turns out to be the criminal, he records all his and Sherlocks actions for the reader but does not record his own involvement in the crime.

Did Agatha Christie know she was doing the fooling-the-reader act? Of course, she knew. She has tried to justify and cover up her deliberate tomfoolery by giving some explanations in the voice of Dr Sheppard as to the manner of his recordings, using smart language to imply different meanings. But, to me, it does not hold water. She has committed the cardinal error of cheating the reader at every step of the story. She has covered up saying the criminal was writing the account with the intention of publishing as a story. Even so, it is not convincing. And that style of recording should bring forth another flaw, which I have mentioned in the end.

You will be fully convinced of my observations if you read the book a second time or for the first time with the previous knowledge that the narrator is the killer. You will see how flawed and plot-holed this novel is. At every step, you’ll know the author is tricking you unjustly, not telling or showing what is glaringly visible to the narrator. It will not be the same feeling if you read any other murder mystery (Agatha Christie’s or anybody else’s) with the prior knowledge of who the murderer is. Rather, you will enjoy the ingenuity of the author in how he conceals the criminal, only that the suspense and surprise elements would be gone in the second-time read.

One other flaw, though here again through some smart and twisted use of sentences with double meanings, she has tried to cover it up. In the end, why should the cops believe that Dr Sheppard was the killer, with not a shred of evidence against him? There is every evidence stacked up against the stepson Ralph Paton. Why wouldn’t the cops take it as the great detective Hercule Poirot's failure to find the killer? The cops would take that stand to settle scores with Poirot who has been constantly pulling the cops down with his one-upmanship, and also for several other reasons, like: 1) There is no evidence against Sheppard, whereas there are enough against Ralph Paton. 2) The story recorded by Sheppard is not really accusatory of or proof against him (because of the observations above) It’s more like a novel than like a confession. Only in the last chapter Dr Sheppard’s account bears a semblance of a confession but not truly a confession. 3) Why did Poirot not invite the Inspector when he arranged, in his house, the final faceoff with all the suspects. 4) Is Poirot justified in urging Dr Sheppard to take his own life instead of facing the law? This soft attitude by Poirot can only strengthen the stand of the cops that Poirot, after all, did fail this time and put it all on a scapegoat, his own assistant.

There are several other flaws for which there are no convincing explanations. But this much should be enough.