The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Hercule Poirot, #4) by Agatha Christie

  

My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Mystery
Content: Clean

 

Roger Ackroyd knew too much. He knew that the woman he loved had poisoned her brutal first husband. He suspected also that someone had been blackmailing her. Then, tragically, came the news that she had taken her own life with an apparent drug overdose.

However the evening post brought Roger one last fatal scrap of information, but before he could finish reading the letter, he was stabbed to death. Luckily one of Roger’s friends and the newest resident to retire to this normally quiet village takes over—none other than Monsieur Hercule Poirot.

Voted by the British Crime Writers’ Association as the "Best Crime Novel of all Time"

 

This was excellent. I enjoyed the humor in the book and the different personalities of the townsfolk. Yet again, Agatha Christie crafted a clever mystery that kept me guessing for a good while. I figured out who the killer was before the end of the book, but had I read it back when it was published, I may not have. To me, what was very impactful about the way this was crafted, was that I liked the murderer all the way up until almost the end, and didn't at all suspect them for most of the book. It made me a little sad that it ended up being this person.

This turned out to be one of my favorites so far. I'm putting some thoughts behind a spoiler button because I don't want to spoil anything for those who have not read this, but I really want to make some comments here about the way this book was written versus modern ones that use the same tactic.

There was apparently an uproar over this book because Christie broke the unspoken rules of mystery writing by making the narrator the killer. This has been copied many, many times now, and unreliable narrators are a real big trend in the mystery/thriller genre now. What I think most writers get wrong is that they aren't able to (or just don't) make the narrator likable the way Christie did here. It's a major reason why I enjoyed this book much more than the modern ones I've read.

 

 

 

 

Overall this was another great read. I was super excited to watch the TV episode based on this one, but ended up disappointed in it. For some reason the very thing that made the book so impactful, was completely eliminated from the show. 

The narrator was changed, so that it wasn't the killer telling the story, but Poirot himself, and he finds the killers journal where he writes about what he's doing, and Poirot is reading it to us as we go along. It just didn't have the same impact. I don't know why they chose to go that route. They could have done it the way it was done in the book. It might have been tricky in a few spots but it could have been done. Also, the actor that played the killer was not at all the way I pictured him.

 

 

 

 

“I have no pity for myself either... But I wish Hercule Poirot had never retired from work and come here to grow vegetable marrows.”