Agatha Christie’s Poirot

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

(Novel, 1926)

In what would become a recurring theme with Christie, it was the taxman that motivated some of the decisions she made in the mid-1920s. Now an established author, she entered into a remarkably cordial correspondence with the Inland Revenue which wondered, in a gentle sort of way, exactly where her earnings were going. It transpired that Christie had little idea herself – she occasionally received cheques, which she cashed and spent. While the tax office seemed more amused than annoyed, it suggested she take her financial affairs more seriously. The result was that Christie returned to the literary agency of Hughes Massie (having initially sought advice there before her first book was published) and met with the man who would represent her for the rest of her career, Edmund Cork. ‘He seemed suitably horrified at my ignorance,’ she later wrote, ‘and was willing to guide my footsteps in future.’[42] One of the first of those steps was to move Christie away from The Bodley Head once her six-book contract had been fulfilled following the publication of the adventure-mystery The Secret of Chimneys (1925), and settle her with a new publisher that could offer better terms. The chosen company was William Collins, Sons & Co. (now HarperCollins), which has remained her publisher ever since. Surely Collins could scarcely believe its luck when Christie delivered her first manuscript for them, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a novel that would outshine all that she had written before and become acknowledged as one of the greatest pieces of detective fiction ever written.

Elements of the surprise that is eventually revealed to be central to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd were independently suggested to Agatha Christie by two people – her brother-in-law, James Watts, and Lord Mountbatten, although she had already undertaken similar subterfuge in The Man in the Brown Suit. However, while the twist is clever in itself, the fact that Christie finds a way to make it work is what deserves the most acclaim. Initially, the mystery seems straightforward, as a wealthy businessman is found murdered in his study near to the village where Poirot has retired to grow marrows. His retirement is interrupted by the case, and for this investigation he’s joined not by Hastings, but by his new neighbour, Dr Sheppard, who lives with his sister Caroline, an unforgettable character who gossips her way through the unravelling of the mystery. Caroline was a favourite creation of Christie’s, who described her as ‘an acidulated spinster, full of curiosity, knowing everything, hearing everything: the complete detective service in the home’, while also citing her as influential in the later development of Miss Marple, who would make her print debut in 1927 in the short story ‘The Tuesday Night Club’.[43],[44] Dr Sheppard’s presence as narrator allows us to reacquaint ourselves with the (to British society eyes) odd little Belgian with his curious quirks. When the doctor’s peaceful gardening is interrupted by a marrow whizzing its way from the detective’s side of the fence, Sheppard describes his neighbour’s ‘egg-shaped head, partially covered with suspiciously black hair, two immense moustaches, and a pair of watchful eyes’, before getting his name wrong (‘Mr Porrott’) in a sign that Poirot’s fame had not reached the heights he may have imagined. Certainly, Sheppard underestimates Poirot’s abilities and gives us a first-hand account of his surprise that the detective is able to piece together the ingenious truth of the mystery. The narration allows us new insight to Poirot’s methods, and the doctor is presented as more amiable than Hastings, but he is also prone to character flaws that mark him out to be someone unsuited to a long-term friendship with the detective.

At the time of its publication as a novel in May 1926 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd initiated a great deal of discussion about the ‘rules’ of crime fiction, and especially the question of whether or not Christie had played fair with the reader.[45] Christie mulled over this argument many years later, but was always satisfied that she had misdirected rather than misled: ‘I have a certain amount of rules. No false words may be uttered by me. To write: “Mrs Armstrong walked home wondering who had committed the murder” would be unfair if she had done it herself. But it’s not unfair to leave things out.’[46]

The reviews of the book itself were almost universally positive, but generally indicated some unease with the nature of the solution, which was often seen as exceptionally clever but potentially problematic, raising questions of whether all readers would be happy with Christie’s sleight of hand. However, in the decades since its publication, the reputation of the book has only grown, and in 2013 the Crime Writers’ Association named it the greatest crime novel of all time. The solution is generally regarded as masterful and satisfying, perhaps only disappointing those who feel annoyed that Christie has caught them out so absolutely. An astute reader has every chance to work out the murderer’s identity if they can bid goodbye to their preconceptions of the genre and its form. The nature of the novel’s structure means that it has been widely discussed, and the writer Pierre Bayard devoted an entire book to an analysis of the mystery, called Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, in which he postulates a fascinating alternative theory regarding the culprit, which will not be spoiled here.

In the context of Christie’s development as an author, we can see the book as an example of her restlessness with the crime genre. She would describe her writings as ‘half way between a crossword puzzle and a hunt in which you can pursue the trail sitting comfortably at home in your armchair’, but the puzzles themselves were ever changing, even in this early period.[47] Despite the perceived clichés in her work as she revisits the same broad scenarios and locations in multiple mysteries, she was never happy just to rework the same plot beats and structure by simply swapping out names and motive. She relished challenging the form, which in turn made her more sophisticated as a writer than many have credited her for. Here, a reading of the novel’s blurb may indicate a retread of themes explored in her first two Poirot novels, but the reader will eventually discover that this is far from true.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is now generally referred to as Christie’s masterpiece, perhaps because of its combination of traditional Christie mystery elements with the astonishing solution. Christie was pleased by the fact that it was her greatest success to date, but in her autobiography seems slightly bemused that it was still being discussed and read many years later. Although Christie placed it in the top ten of her own books when asked in 1972, in 1975 the writer Julian Symons claimed that the author was not particularly enamoured with the book, as he recounted that ‘When The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is mentioned she says “oh dear oh dear, surely I’ve written something better than that?”’.[48]

The Big Four

(Novel/short stories, 1927)

Given that Collins can only have been pleased with the quality and reception of Agatha Christie’s first book for them, the publisher would surely have been concerned when the novelist disappeared following the breakdown of her marriage, and then perhaps privately thrilled when she returned accompanied by exceptional levels of attendant publicity. Over the years, the story of Agatha Christie’s disappearance in December 1926 has attracted extraordinary levels of attention from writers in all areas of fact and fiction, but the facts are simple. Following the death of her mother earlier in 1926 and then the breakdown of her marriage to Archie, Agatha left the family home and retreated to The Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, where she stayed under a pseudonym influenced by the name of her husband’s mistress. It seems likely that Agatha had had some form of breakdown. ‘I married at twenty-four and we were very happy for eleven years,’ she later remembered. ‘Then my mother died a very painful death and my husband found a young woman. Well, you can’t write your own fate. Your fate comes to you.’[49]

Understandably, the very public search for Christie appeared to embarrass her, having never been keen on publicity. ‘Being an author is very difficult because it spoils a lot of your private life,’ she would tell an interviewer many years later. ‘People come up to you and say “How do you do? I did enjoy so-and-so”. You thank them and then they want to get away and you want to get away and it is all very embarrassing.’[50] When she was eventually found Christie claimed amnesia and rarely referred to the event again.[51] The events would haunt her for the rest of her life – following the abduction of Muriel McKay in December 1969 (in an apparent case of mistaken identity in an attempt to extort money from media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose wife was the intended target) the press quickly turned to Christie to comment on the mystery. ‘BBC rang me up (so did a lot of newspapers!) to suggest I would like to comment on disappearance of Mrs McKay “as disappearing tricks are right up your street, aren’t they?”,’ Christie wrote to Cork in January 1970. ‘A very brash and impertinent young man. I refused and was rude to him.’[52]

Although the experience instilled an understandable distrust of the press for capitalising on a deeply personal trauma, the crises leading up to Christie’s brief disappearance would have little impact in the long term on the mysteries she wrote. In the short term, however, they created something of a bump in the road. Unable to concentrate on writing, Christie was nevertheless in need of money and so reworked two existing ideas for her next two Poirot novels in order to make it as easy as possible to fulfil her contractual obligations. For The Big Four the alterations were minimal, as the book would essentially reprint a twelve-part serial novel already published in The Sketch in 1924 under the umbrella title The Man Who Was Number Four. These linked short stories outlined the nefarious deeds of a ‘big four’ of criminals, who were setting out to disrupt world order. It was Christie’s brother-in-law, Campbell Christie, who suggested that these stories could be minimally reworked to create a ‘new’ novel, and there is still some debate regarding his contribution – it’s possible that he wrote most (or even all) of the new linking material ready for its publication in January 1927.[53]

However, if anything, stringing the serial together as a novel only weakens the mysteries, as they manage to be both inconsistent and repetitive (twice in the first hundred pages Poirot is inspired to make a sudden exit from a train before it reaches its destination), littered with non-sequiturs that are more jarring when read in quick succession. While the reader may detect a mellowing of Hastings, who’s happy to indulge in light-hearted laughter about the case with both Japp and Poirot, this perhaps signals another problem with the book – that Poirot simply doesn’t fit into The Big Four’s world of spies and international politics, which leads to awkward adjustments to his character. It might be better to imagine Tommy and Tuppence, married investigators always looking for a big adventure, in Poirot’s place – thrill-seekers who would be happy to run around the world in order to unmask the evil cartel behind a collection of murders and thefts of sensitive material. They would also have imbued the novel with a better sense of fun, whereas Poirot’s established grounding in real-life domestic cases makes the image of him battling a group of spies like an action hero feel unconvincing rather than exciting.

Nevertheless, there are still some great ideas on display in The Big Four, notably the explanation of the apparently invisible murderer in the chapter ‘The Importance of a Leg of Mutton’, which has some prime Poirot deduction, and the shocking story behind the death of a premier chess player in ‘A Chess Problem’. Given the early publication date of the short stories it’s no surprise that after The Murder of Roger Ackroyd the novel feels like a regression of Christie’s style, but the presence of Poirot in this adventure of international conspiracy also shows us a glimpse of a road not travelled by Christie.

As far as the author was concerned, she considered The Big Four to be ‘rotten’ and, along with the subsequent Poirot novel The Mystery of the Blue Train, the first time that she had to force herself to work to order for financial and contractual reasons. This led to her determination always to have a manuscript ‘in hand’ wherever possible, to alleviate the pressure of deadlines and allow for the realities of life to interrupt her writing when needed. Nevertheless, upon its publication in January 1927 the novel was a commercial success, no doubt helped by Christie’s name having been so prominently featured in the press. It was also reviewed positively by many critics, with the Daily Express describing it as ‘one of the liveliest and most entertaining mystery stories that has been written for some time’, while The Observer made the point that ‘the short interpolated mysteries within the mystery are really much more interesting than the machinations of the “Big Four”’, once more revealing where Christie’s strengths lay.[54] Although it deserves credit for satisfying so many of its readers when published, one can only imagine the shock of murder mystery aficionados picking up the next Poirot book by the author of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd only to find an international thriller with evil masterminds, laser-like energy beams, thefts of radium, and an exploding mountain inhabited by spies.

In April 1927 Collins took out an advert in The Manchester Guardian to showcase some of its newer books. The Big Four was one of the titles to be mentioned (‘a thrilling story’), while it claimed that ‘The publishers hope to receive Mrs Christie’s manuscript for her next detective novel, The Mystery of the Blue Train, very soon,’ before giving a somewhat coy update on the author herself: ‘Mrs Christie has been recuperating in the Canary Islands after her recent illness.’[55] The dramas of 1926 had been put to one side, and it would soon be business as usual once more.

The Mystery of the Blue Train

(Novel, 1928)

Personal insights from Agatha Christie regarding her own stories are relatively rare for an author with such a lengthy and distinguished career. Much of her autobiography covers her childhood and matters away from her writing – but, when she did discuss her own works, there was one recurring opinion. As she said in 1966, ‘Easily the worst book I ever wrote was The Mystery of the Blue Train. I hate it.’[56] Objectively, it’s not difficult to imagine that it was really this period of Christie’s life that she was so unhappy with, rather than her writing, but there’s no doubt that Christie made this novel the focus of her misery at this time. In an unpublished portion of her autobiography, she elaborated on her feelings further:

I have always hated The Mystery of the Blue Train. Presumably I turned out a fairly decent piece of work, since some people say it is their favourite book (and if they say so they always go down in my estimation). It was terribly full of clichés, the plot was predictable, the people were unreal. It got better towards the end because when you have lived with a thing long enough, and pushed yourself on, you cannot help allying yourself a little with what you are writing about. But it certainly had no zest, no joie de vivre, no faintest flash of enjoyment about it.[57]

While The Mystery of the Blue Train is not without its flaws, few readers could agree with Christie’s complete dismissal of it even though such feelings lingered long in her memory.

Perhaps any reader with no knowledge of the context of the writing of the novel could view it as simply a slightly lesser Poirot mystery. However, read with a recuperating Christie in mind, forcing herself to complete a book in the shadow of the death of her beloved mother and the end of her marriage, it’s not difficult to see evidence of the laborious hard work and systematic processes that Christie has undertaken to transform a good Poirot short story into a full-length novel. This short story was ‘The Mystery of the Plymouth Express’, originally published during The Sketch’s run of Poirot short stories in 1923, and much remains unchanged.[58] The basic story concerns a woman who is found murdered in a train carriage (in the novel she is travelling towards the French Riviera, rather than the short story’s Devon), having apparently been the victim of a plot to steal valuable jewellery that she was travelling with. The book then expands on some obvious potential villains in both the victim’s husband and the lover of the dead woman, a mysterious Count. There’s also a web of alibis that will take the considerable powers of deduction of Poirot to untangle.

The struggle to expand the original story is all too obvious from the opening, however, as Christie offers both narrative dead-ends and disorientating shifts of focus in an attempt to lend some atmosphere and mystery early on. While this material may have been added for stylistic reasons, much of it is also evident as padding, especially when re-read with the knowledge of which plot threads remain relevant, and which come to nothing. In fact, the story itself is a relatively rare Christie that is only really satisfying on its first reading as she works to obfuscate and distract from the actually rather simple (if ingenious) plotting of the murderer. The truth is that the neatly plotted short story does not offer enough material for the fully expanded novel, something that Christie was clearly well aware of, and so she provides a plethora of distractions, particularly extraneous characters, to ensure that the bare bones of the mystery are not inspected too closely, lest the reader should work out the case rather quicker than the author would like.