When I was looking for detective fiction to read, Agatha Christie kept coming up in recommendation lists. She is so widely loved that many readers even refer to her by an affectionate nickname. Her most famous novels are probably Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, and And Then There Were None. I had not read any of those, though I had at least heard of Murder on the Orient Express before. Since The Murder of Roger Ackroyd also has a strong reputation, I decided to start there.
One difficulty I often have with British and American novels is the names. They can be long, and characters are sometimes referred to by their first names and sometimes by their surnames, which makes it easy to lose track of who is who. In this book, for example, the owner of the estate is Roger Ackroyd. His brother’s widow is Mrs. Cecil Ackroyd, and his niece is Flora Ackroyd. At the beginning, this took some getting used to. Whenever the name “Ackroyd” appeared, I was not always sure which person it meant, and I had to read carefully before I could clearly distinguish between Ackroyd, Mrs. Ackroyd, and Miss Ackroyd.
The novel is told from the perspective of Dr. Sheppard, the local doctor, who is involved in the investigation almost from start to finish. What makes the book so striking is that the final outcome turns out to be connected to the doctor in a way I never would have guessed in advance. Until the ending, I completely assumed he occupied the kind of role Watson usually does in detective fiction: the observer, the assistant, the person who helps the real detective.
There are quite a lot of characters in the story, roughly sixteen in all, and their relationships are fairly tangled. Even so, the novel never feels messy. Christie handles the cast with impressive control, and the plot remains tightly organized throughout. The story moves closely around the murder case itself, without wandering off into unnecessary subplots. It unfolds in a straightforward chronological order, which makes the case easier to follow and also makes the reading experience especially satisfying.
There were also a few parts where I felt the author had access to a godlike view of everything and suddenly revealed connections I had completely failed to detect. The relationship between Russell and Charles Kent, for instance, and the one between Ralph Paton and Ursula Bourne, were both developments I did not see coming at all.
While reading, I kept trying to guess who the murderer was, but I simply could not figure it out. Even near the end, I was still nowhere close. If the penultimate chapter had not laid out the killer’s method step by step, I do not think I would have arrived at the answer on my own. That final reversal genuinely shocked me.
I came away thinking this is a very good detective novel. Once you adjust to Christie’s narrative rhythm and settle into the way she tells the story, it becomes tremendously engrossing.