Review: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Significantly better than the previous novel in the series ( The Murder on the Links ), and I'm not sure whether that's because of Hastings' absence or despite it.

What I mean is that Hastings was an actual impediment in Links, but here I felt Poirot was different without him, as if the Poirot-and-Hastings collaboration was itself almost a character. But Poirot finds a kind of substitute in the doctor who narrates this book, taking him with him while he investigates (like Hastings, and like the young doctors in Austin Freeman, he seems to have a lot of leisure time despite theoretically having a job), and bouncing ideas off him. Poirot remains, as always, inscrutable about his conclusions from the various clues, until the traditional gathering of the suspects for the dramatic reveal.

And it is dramatic. The twist in this particular book is famous, and I did know about it in advance, but even so, I found it hard to spot the clues. It all comes down to timing, like so many mystery stories.

The process, the incidental human stories that get revealed (as usual in this sort of cosy mystery, everyone has some sort of secret; Poirot explicitly says to a group of the suspects that he knows each of them is hiding something), and the clever solution are all at a high standard by classic mystery measures. The doctor's sister alone is worth the price of admission: the centre of the village gossip network, she's better than a newspaper at gathering, generating and disseminating rumour and speculation, which varies from highly accurate to highly inaccurate, but which she always delivers with the same level of confidence. The romance subplots are a little weak, particularly without Hastings and his susceptibility to redheads, and the police's main suspect is offstage for almost the entire novel and a near-nonentity once he does appear, but it still lands right at the top of the Silver tier of my annual recommendation list.

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