A large vegetable marrow flies over the garden wall and lands at the doctor’s feet. The man who threw it is a small foreigner with an egg-shaped head. He has retired to the village to grow marrows, and he is losing patience with them. Within days, Hercule Poirot will be back at work. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the third Poirot novel by Agatha Christie, published by Collins in the summer of 1926. It is also the detective novel that people still argue about a century later.
What Is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd About?
The village of King’s Abbot has one favourite hobby, and it is gossip. The wealthy widow Mrs Ferrars dies of an overdose, and the village decides she has taken her own life. The talk also says she poisoned her husband a year earlier. That same evening, Roger Ackroyd, a rich manufacturer who hoped to marry her, tells the village doctor what she had confessed to him. She had killed her husband, and someone had been blackmailing her ever since.
A letter from Mrs Ferrars arrives, naming the blackmailer. Ackroyd sends the doctor away so he can read it alone. Later that night Roger Ackroyd is found stabbed to death in his study, and the letter has gone. His stepson, Ralph Paton, has vanished, and the police want him badly. Flora, who is engaged to Ralph Paton, asks the new neighbour to find the truth. So the recently retired detective Hercule Poirot goes back to work.
The Main Characters
- Hercule Poirot, the retired Belgian detective, known to the villagers as “Mr Porrott”
- Dr James Sheppard, the local doctor, who helps Poirot and tells the story
- Caroline Sheppard, his unmarried sister and the best-informed person in the village
- Roger Ackroyd, the victim, a wealthy widower and the owner of Fernly Park
- Flora Ackroyd, his niece, and her widowed mother, Mrs Cecil Ackroyd
- Captain Ralph Paton, Ackroyd’s charming stepson
- Major Hector Blunt, a big-game hunter staying at the house
- Geoffrey Raymond, the secretary, Parker the butler, Miss Russell the housekeeper and Ursula Bourne the parlourmaid
- Inspector Raglan, who leads the police inquiry
Caroline steals every scene she is in. Christie later said the character of Caroline Sheppard was a first sketch for Miss Marple.
Why Is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd So Famous?
Because of its twist ending. The solution does something no detective story had done so boldly, and readers have been telling each other “don’t spoil it” ever since. In 2013 the members of the Crime Writers’ Association voted it the finest crime novel ever written. It had already been placed fifth on the association’s top 100 list in 1990. TIME included it in its 2023 list of the 100 best mystery and thriller books, noting that its twist inspired countless later books.
It also changed Christie’s career. Her two earlier Poirot novels were well received. This one made her famous.
Why Is It Controversial? The Fair-Play Debate
In the 1920s, detective fiction ran on unwritten rules of fair play between author and reader. The solution of this novel breaks one of those rules. Which rule it breaks is the spoiler, so we will not name it here.
The argument started at once. In 1927 the American critic Willard Huntington Wright, who wrote as S. S. Van Dine, called the device hardly legitimate, and he published his own “twenty rules” for detective stories a year later. Dorothy L. Sayers took the other side in 1928. It is the reader’s business, she wrote, to suspect everybody, and Christie had given all the necessary clues. In 1929 Ronald Knox published his famous “Decalogue” of rules for detective fiction. In his commentary he admitted that some of Mrs Christie’s books made one rule hard to state.
The debate never quite ended. In 1998 the French literary scholar Pierre Bayard wrote a whole book arguing that Poirot named the wrong person. The official Christie site notes that the first reviews were mostly admiring, and that readers who felt fooled tended to blame themselves.
Is It Agatha Christie’s Most Controversial Book?
Yes, for arguments about fair play, this is the usual answer. Library and publisher descriptions routinely call it her most controversial novel. Christie bent the rules elsewhere too, most famously in Murder on the Orient Express. None of those books caused a row like this one.
There is a second candidate, for a different reason. And Then There Were None was first published in Britain in 1939 under a title that was a racial slur. The American edition changed it from the start, and British editions kept it until 1985. So the fight over Ackroyd is about the craft of the mystery novel. The controversy over And Then There Were None is about its title.
Our Review: A Detective Novel You Will Want to Read Twice
Take away the ending and this is still a very good Christie. The village is sharply observed, Caroline is funny, and Poirot, bored with his marrows, is at his most playful. Watch how Poirot questions each member of the household: politely, and never quite about the thing he wants to know. His remark early on that everyone concerned in a case has something to hide turns out to be the key to the whole book. Almost every character is hiding something, and Christie uses each small secret to lead you away from the big one.
Then comes the solution, and you want to start again from page one. On a second reading the clues are all there, in plain sight. That is the real achievement: the trick is fair, even if it does not feel fair the first time.
The middle section works through a long list of suspects and alibis, and the cast of the household can blur. The critic Robert Barnard went further and called it, apart from the solution, a fairly conventional Christie. We disagree, but not by much.
Themes: Secrets, Gossip and Justice
Secrets drive everything. A blackmailer lives off one, and the Ackroyd household is full of smaller ones: debts, a stolen sum, a past that someone would rather forget. Gossip is the second theme, and Christie treats it with affection. Caroline’s network of informers usually knows the facts before the police do. The third is justice: what should happen to a guilty person, and who should decide.
Literary Significance and Reception
The first reviewers were impressed. The Times Literary Supplement thought very few readers would solve it. The New York Times Book Review said few detective stories gave readers more to think about. The Observer praised it as breathless reading to the last page. The Scotsman admitted readers might feel fairly or unfairly sold, and still called it one of the cleverest books of its kind.
Later critics kept returning to it as a landmark of the Golden Age of detective fiction. Howard Haycraft put it on his 1941 list of the cornerstones of the mystery genre. Christie’s biographer Laura Thompson called it the ultimate detective novel. In 1945 Edmund Wilson attacked the whole genre in an essay whose title asked who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd. That he chose this book shows how famous it already was.
Agatha Christie and the Year of Roger Ackroyd
Dame Agatha credited the central idea to her brother-in-law, James Watts. Lord Louis Mountbatten also wrote to her with a similar suggestion in 1924, and she used neither version as it was. She dedicated the book to her sister Madge, who had once dared her to write a detective story. It was her first book with Collins, the publisher who stayed with her for the rest of her career.
The year it came out was the hardest of her life. Her mother had died that spring. In December, after her first husband, Archie, asked for a divorce, Christie disappeared for eleven days. We tell that story in our Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? review.
Adaptations: From Alibi to David Suchet
- 1928: Alibi, a stage play by Michael Morton, with Charles Laughton as Poirot. It was the first Christie work on stage, long before The Mousetrap became the longest-running play in London theatre. Christie disliked it for turning Caroline into a young girl.
- 1931: a British film of Alibi, with Austin Trevor as Poirot. No copy is known to survive.
- 1939: a CBS radio version in which Orson Welles played both Poirot and Dr Sheppard.
- 1987: a BBC Radio 4 version with John Moffatt as Poirot.
- 2000: the TV version in the Poirot series with David Suchet, a fairly free adaptation.
- 2002: a Russian mini-series, Poirot’s Failure.
- 2018: Kuroido Goroshi, a Japanese television film written by Kōki Mitani and set in 1950s Japan.
- 2023: a new stage version by Mark Shanahan, first performed in Houston.
How to Watch or Read It
If you live in the United States, you can read it free. The novel entered the US public domain on 1 January 2022, and the novel is on Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks. In Britain and the rest of Europe it stays in copyright until the end of 2046, so buy or borrow it there. HarperCollins publishes it in the UK and William Morrow in the US, and the audiobook read by Hugh Fraser is the official one. For the book’s hundredth birthday in 2026 there is an edition with the solution sealed in an envelope.
Our advice: read the novel before you watch any version. The way the story is told matters, and the screen cannot quite copy it. The David Suchet episode is on DVD in the Poirot series 7 box set; streaming offers change by country.
Where It Fits in the Hercule Poirot Series
It is the third Poirot novel. It follows The Murder on the Links (1923) and comes before The Big Four (1927). Later high points of the series include Death on the Nile (1937). Captain Hastings is missing, married and living in Argentina, which is why the doctor takes his place beside Poirot. You can read it first. If you would rather meet Poirot at the start, begin with our The Mysterious Affair at Styles review. For more classic English crime fiction, see our British cozy mysteries page.
Quick Facts
| Author | Agatha Christie |
|---|---|
| Series | Hercule Poirot, third novel |
| First published | June 1926, Collins, London |
| Setting | King’s Abbot, an English village |
| Sleuth | Hercule Poirot, with Dr James Sheppard |
| Honour | Crime Writers’ Association vote, 2013: the finest crime novel ever |
| Next book | The Big Four (1927) |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd a cozy mystery?
It is a Golden Age mystery novel with many cozy ingredients: a village, a gossip, a doctor and no graphic violence. The cozy genre grew out of books like this one.
Do I need to read the earlier Poirot books first?
No. It stands alone, and Hastings does not appear.
Was it first published as a serial?
Yes. It ran in the London Evening News in 1925 as “Who Killed Ackroyd?”.
Is it the best crime novel ever written?
The Crime Writers’ Association thought so in 2013. Many readers would put it in the top three of Christie’s crime novels.