The Murder of Roger Ackroyd: A Hercule Poirot Mystery

From the book cover

Roger Ackroyd knew too much. He knew that the woman he loved had poisoned her brutal first husband. He suspected also that someone had been blackmailing her. Then tragically, came the news that she had taken her own life with a drug overdose.

But the evening post brought Roger one last fatal scrap of information. Unfortunately, before he could finish reading the letter, he was stabbed to death.
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Spoiler Alert

"The letters were brought in at twenty minutes to nine. It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread. I hesitated with my hand on the door handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had left undone."

"I did what little had to be done."

With the above statements the reader is meant to clue in that the narrator is the murderer. I'm a trusting reader so I assume that the narrator is providing complete details about his involvement in the crime. At one point I wondered if the narrator might be the murderer because it's always the person you least suspect, but I brushed my suspicions aside because the narrator was playing Watson to Hercule Poirot's Sherlocke Holmes.

I really enjoyed this novel but couldn't help shaking my head at a couple oddities.

Some of the characters openly admit to entering and leaving the house via windows, and others are suspected of doing so. Did people  in the 1920s and 30s commonly use windows to enter homes? This is the second Agatha Christie novel in which it is mentioned casually that someone entered or left through the window. In the first novel that I noticed it, The Secret at Chimneys, everyone from suspects to detectives use window short cuts... Why wouldn't these people just use a side or back door? Both mysteries take place in large country homes, surely there is more than just the front door.

Another issue is with the relationship between Ralph Paton  and Roger Ackroyd. Early in the novel Ralph is introduced as Roger Ackroyd's stepson then all of a sudden midway through the novel he's referred to as his nephew and then at the end of the novel he's back to being Roger's stepson. What gives with the inconsistencies? Agatha Christie is the most widely published author, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare, surely she had an editor.

3/5