Poirot Retrospective #1: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

 Poirot Retrospective #1: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

After years and years and years of reading detective fiction, I've decided to go and read basically all of the Agatha Christie murder mysteries featuring the fussy and fastidious Belgian detective Hercules Poirot. Rather than attempt them in any sort of order, I just pick them up as I find them on sale, and I decided to start with the one that is consistently voted the best: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926).

Well, hot damn, this is a great novel. It's not just great, I would argue this helped define the entire genre, and might easily be the most important murder mystery/detective novel since the Sherlock Holmes books of the early 1900s, and until the noir movement of the '40s.

Why is it so great? A lot of reasons. The murder is a typical "locked room" type - a rich man is killed in his study, he had several guests, mysterious people are wandering the area, his servants are lying or otherwise acting strangely, and many or all of them had the motive to do him in. Or did they? Things are never quite what you think here.

Every Agatha Christie book I've read has at least one big twist at the end, and often two or even three. This book's twist was mind-bending - I refuse to spoil it, but it calls everything you know into question, both in terms of the plot and in terms of being a reader of a mystery book. It is a tremendously clever move that astonished me, especially given the date of 1926. No wonder Christie is the bestselling author in English (sorry Shakespeare).

The novel is narrated by a country doctor who lives next to Poirot; at this point in his life, Poirot is semi-retired and growing vegetables in a small English village, in exile due to the turbulence in his home country of Brussels during World War I.

Poirot really doesn't change very much from novel to novel - he must have arrived to Christie more or less complete in her imagination. The only thing I've noticed over the course of the books is that he grows a little more cynical and melancholy about human nature in the later books - but who wouldn't, after specializing in solving murders as a livelihood?

Poirot is an ex-policeman, has a famous mustache (I love Kenneth Branagh's take on this in the recent movies, the wild double handlebar), loves order and symmetry, has a very deep fascination with and understanding of psychology, hates traveling by boat, dresses extremely well, and is more or less independently wealthy due to high profile clients (like Holmes). He also has a Man Friday; just as Holmes had Watson, Poirot has Hastings.

Hastings doesn't appear in this novel - more's the pity - but he's a great sidekick and narrates many of the Poirot stories. We'll get to him in another review. In this book, the country doctor plays the Hastings role of rather unimaginative fuddy duddy who plods along and is amused and sometimes shocked by Poirot's knife-like insights.

The characters are all fleshed out well here, and as I always say: good characters make for good suspects (and good victims). The murder is interesting, the solution is interesting, and nothing is forced or cheap (as in some later Christie novels - we'll get there).

This book also doesn't really have what I like to call Cabot Cove Syndrome, named after the most frequent setting on the show Murder She Wrote - that's when the main character just happens to stumble over murder after murder after murder until it becomes ridiculous. In this one, the murder occurs in the same general county as Poirot has relocated to, and he comes on the case rather naturally.

I've read about 15-16 Poirot books so far, and this is easily the best. Christie does something wild here that implicates the entire genre and it pays off in spades. No wonder this is frequently voted her best book: it's a landmark of the genre.