The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The spine is required, and its economy is the book’s first strength. Mrs Ferrars’s death, her letter, the ten minutes in the study, the dictaphone and the telephone call from King’s Abbot station are each indispensable: remove any one and the solution falls. Even the village comedy bears load, since Caroline’s gossip, the mah jong evening and the talk over the hedge supply clues and, above all, cover. The subtractive test bites on the secondary mysteries made to multiply suspects: Ursula Bourne’s secret marriage, Mrs Ackroyd’s debts, Charles Kent’s parentage, Flora’s choice between Ralph Paton and Major Blunt. Each is resolved in turn, and each could be exchanged for another of its kind without loss to what the book finds. They are required by the genre’s need for doors, not by the argument; the spine carries the axis above them.

Score: 7.8 / 10

What the book brings into the open can be stated, and it holds, but it is narrow. The first finding concerns narration itself: a truthful account can lie by omission, and the reader who trusts the voice that tells him everything is the easiest to deceive. The Apologia proves it by quoting the narrator’s earlier sentence back and showing that every word was true. The second is social: the respectable professional man, trusted with the village’s bodies and secrets, is the one no one examines, and his small venal motive wears the decency of his station. What holds the axis low is depth. Sheppard’s mind is withheld by design, so the condition behind the crime is barely shown, and the village’s respectability is observed with comedy rather than examined. The disclosure is of a device and a type more than of a life.

Score: 7.3 / 10

Elevation comes once, and it is the cold kind. The revelation that the narrator is the murderer, and the Apologia that follows, produce a real vertigo: the whole book turns over in the reader’s hands. The last pages, in which the doctor writes his confession knowing what he will take when he has finished, have a dry chill that lingers, and Poirot’s private offer, a quiet death to spare Caroline the trial, has a hard gravity. Against that, the book does not aim at height. Its register is comic and domestic, its prose plain, its scenes of inquiry brisk and level; there is no beauty of description, little terror before the end, and no grandeur of feeling. Ackroyd’s death is a puzzle, not a loss. One summit, of intellectual surprise more than transport, in a level work holds the axis at 6.6, level with The Encompassed at the foot of the twelve.

Score: 6.6 / 10

Myth is built in one figure and evoked elsewhere. The healer who kills is an old shape, and here it bears load: the physician trusted with the village’s life is its poisoner’s blackmailer and its murderer, and his access to the body, to the house and to the confidences of the dying is the means of the crime and of its concealment. The second built figure is the betraying chronicler: the faithful companion of the detective story, the Watson or the Hastings who is the reader’s proxy, turned into the hidden enemy. That is myth built within the genre’s own mythology, shallower ground than the old myths. The village as a closed garden with a serpent, the detective as an all-seeing judge who grants the guilty a death by his own hand, and Caroline as the village’s oracle of gossip are evoked, not built.

Score: 7.3 / 10

This is the book’s claim, and it is real. The inheritance in 1926 was the detective story after Conan Doyle, with its tacit contract: the narrator is the reader’s ally, sees what the detective sees, and may be dull but is never false. Christie broke the contract at its centre and made the breach the solution, so that the form’s own convention became the murderer’s cover. The cost was real: the book was attacked as cheating, the debate over fair play it provoked was fierce, and a young author staked a reputation on a trick that could have been rejected as a fraud on the reader. What keeps the axis below the bar is width: the swerve is one turn, of one convention, in one genre, and the novel’s other habits of character, scene and prose are the genre’s as Christie found them.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Change the form and the book ceases to exist. Told in the third person, or by Poirot, or by any other character, it would be an ordinary detective story with an unlikely culprit. What it knows, that the reader has been deceived by the voice he trusted and that the deception was made of true sentences, lives only in a first-person account written by the murderer as a record of the detective’s failure and turned by its last chapters into a confession. The form is the weapon and the evidence at once. The chapters are built so that the narrator’s omissions sit at the joins, and the Apologia rereads the book from inside its own form. Held below the top because the achievement is concentrated in the frame and a few sentences: the long middle of interviews and minor mysteries is the genre’s ordinary form, and any narrator could carry it.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Evidence over a century, and of two kinds. The book is reread more than most detective novels because the second reading is a different book: every sentence of Sheppard’s becomes double, and the reader goes back to find where the ten minutes were hidden and how the doctor’s dryness about his sister reads once his motive is known. It has drawn sustained argument: on fair play in the 1920s and after, in the theory of the unreliable narrator, and in Pierre Bayard’s Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? of 1998, which reopens the solution and argues for another culprit. Against that, the yield is largely of one kind and soon mapped. Once the double reading is done the book offers little more on a third, and its people, Caroline apart, do not repay return. The yield is deep on the device and thin on the life.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The field is the detective novel in English and, more widely, the English novel of the 1920s. The intrinsic force is real: the book reorganised what the detective novel could do with its own narration, showing that the reader’s trust in the form was itself material for the plot, and it raised the stakes of fair play for every writer after. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the rules of fair play drawn up by the Golden Age writers in the years that followed, and the Detection Club’s debate over whether the book had cheated; Christie’s own return to the narrator who kills, in Endless Night (1967); a long line of crime fiction and film built on the concealing narrator; and a standing place in the theory of the unreliable narrator. Within the genre the reach is near the top. Outside it, in the year of The Sun Also Rises and a year after Mrs Dalloway, narration was being reorganised elsewhere and at greater depth, and the book’s reach there is a single device.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over a hundred years. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print without a break since 1926, in English and in a very large number of translations; Christie is among the most widely translated and sold authors in any language, and this is among her most read books. Presence is continuous and of the widest kind among readers. Two charges keep the axis at the usual figure for its span rather than above it. The presence is mostly sales and popular reading, which earn at most a tenth and do not prove permanence, and its place in teaching is narrower, largely confined to the history of the genre and the theory of narration. And its surface is in part fixed to its moment: the village of the 1920s, with its servants and its dictaphone, is read now partly as period. The text, and the trick that makes it, have plainly outlived their conditions.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on Christie’s English, with no translation between. The construction is the book’s craft, and it is masterly: the clues are laid with exact fairness, the dictaphone, the chair and the telephone call placed so that each is visible and none is weighed, and the narrator’s sentences written so that each is literally true and the whole is false. That double writing is load-bearing making of a rare kind, and the Apologia proves its precision. Three charges hold the axis below the eights. The prose is plain and often thin, with serviceable sentences, stock description and little texture of place or person. The dialogue is functional and in places stagey, Poirot’s mannered English and his “little grey cells” a manner rather than a voice. And the people outside the Sheppard house are types, assembled for suspicion.

Score: 7.8 / 10

One law governs the book: everything said is evidence, and the speaker’s interest bends it. Take the two most distant elements, Caroline’s comic gossip over the breakfast table and the hedge, and the doctor’s last pages, alone with his confession and the veronal. They obey the same law. Caroline’s guesses are the village’s form of detection, half right and wholly motivated; the doctor’s narrative is the same thing done with intelligence and to deceive. The comedy and the death share one physics, and the range from mah jong to suicide is held. Two charges. The range is narrow: one village, one week, one class of household. And the frame strains once examined: why the murderer would write a narrative of the inquiry so made that it convicts him, and keep it to its end, the book answers only with his vanity, which it has not shown enough of.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Judged on what one detective novel holds. The village of King’s Abbot as a society: its gentry, its doctor, its servants and their own order of rank, its gossip as an economy of information. Money: speculation, debts, inheritance, blackmail, and a household that lives on Ackroyd’s purse. The family: brother and sister, a stepson, a widowed sister-in-law and her daughter, a housekeeper’s illegitimate son. The law and its officers, the inquest and the police. Consciousness, in the narrator’s concealing mind. These are joined by the plot, not merely listed. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve: consciousness is withheld by design; the state and history are absent; the sacred and the natural order are absent; labour appears as service and is not examined. A small society held in one structure, with most orders of reality left outside the gate.

Score: 6.6 / 10