The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)

"This novel created a huge amount of publicity and discussion when it first came out because Christie did something that just broke every rule in the mystery genre playbook. Her narrator—Doctor James Shephard—is carrying us through the story and we think this is a first-person voice “shepherding” us through the story. Then at the end, the twist is that Shepherd is the murderer. He’s the one who had blackmailed and brutally killed and he was the one who orchestrated this really complicated murder scenario with a Dictaphone. That just blew everyone away when the book came out. A lot of people think this is brilliant and other people felt like Agatha Christie cheated. You can’t do this to us! You should have told us! But if she had told us, the book would have been two pages long. I come down on the side of the group that says it was a brilliant move. It was audacious. Was it a flagrant violation of the codebook of mystery writers? Yeah, it probably was, but it was also really cool. Even aside from all of that, it has all the elements of a typical Christie novel. You have Poirot, who never misses anything; you have all the red herrings—all the people who could have committed the crime, where everybody had a motive to kill—and the clues were laid out there very neatly. It was maybe one of the first mystery novels written where a dictaphone was used. Dictaphone technology was pretty recent back then, so obviously she kept up to date with all of that stuff. So, it was really interesting, innovative, and probably one of the most memorable mystery stories—by her device of allowing the narrator to be the killer. Oh, absolutely. I have all the collections of the Agatha Christie adaptions on DVD and I go back and watch them from time to time. I’ve probably watched The Murder of Roger Ackroyd maybe 20 times. I can tell you that the ending never changes! James Shepherd is brought to justice at the end by his own hand. But they’re fun and I go back and re-read Christie all of the time. Her plots are really good. She’s not the prose stylist that Raymond Chandler is, but that was never her intent, I think. But she knew what she was doing. Her plotting skills were pretty unbeatable."

"I think this is a thriller, like all of her books, because plot is king in them and characterisation takes more of a back seat. This is probably the most famous of all her books, and certainly, for me, the cleverest. It was written in 1926 and it’s original because the twist at the end is stunning. How much can I give away with something like this? All right. Well, the narrator is a village doctor who acts as Hercule Poirot’s assistant throughout the book because Hastings is away in Argentina. All the way through, the doctor’s working hard alongside Hercule Poirot to solve the murder and it turns out right at the very end that he is the murderer. And it’s brilliant because it catches you out completely. People have tried the same formula – that of the so-called unreliable narrator – many times since, but Agatha Christie was the first to use this technique. And if you read the novel again, you can see how beautifully she sets it up. There’s nothing forced in the writing and there are no devices set up to mislead you. To have that original idea is just genius, and she was a genius."