‘You will find, M. le docteur, if you have much to do with cases of this kind, that they all resemble each other in one thing.’
‘What is that?’ I asked curiously.
‘Everyone concerned in them has something to hide.’
‘Have I?’ I asked, smiling.
Poirot looked at me attentively.
‘I think you have,’ he said quietly.
(The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Chapter 7)
‘Everything is simple, if you arrange the facts methodically.’
(Poirot wisdom, Chapter 7)
Poirot carefully straightened a china ornament on one of the bookcases.
(Poirot’s symmetry OCD, Chapter 8)
When everyone was assembled, Poirot rose and bowed. ‘Messieurs, mesdames, I have called you together for a certain purpose.’
(First instance of the calling together of all the suspects which was to become a cliché of the genre, Chapter 12)
‘I implored you to be frank with me. What one does not tell to Papa Poirot he finds out.’
(His rather creepy habit of calling himself Papa Poirot when talking to young women, Chapter 18)
‘Now, madame,’ he smiled at her, his head on one side, his forefinger wagging eloquently, ‘no questions. And do not torment yourself. Be of good courage, and place your faith in Hercule Poirot.’
(Poirot’s saviour complex, Chapter 22)
This is the third novel to feature Agatha Christie’s famous detective, Hercule Poirot, but unlike its predecessors and most of its sequels, it is not narrated by Poirot’s sidekick, Captain Arthur Hastings, but by a completely new character, a Dr James Sheppard.
In the quiet village of King’s Abbot, bluff old Roger Ackroyd is found dead, stabbed in the neck, in the study of his country house, Fernly Park. On the day of his death he had had a conversation with the narrator, Dr Sheppard, in which he had shared a terrible secret. Only the day before, a long-time inhabitant of the village, a Mrs Ferrars, had committed suicide with an overdose of the sleeping pill veronal. Only a year earlier her husband, Ashley Ferrars, had died, supposedly of acute gastritis brought on by heavy drinking, although the narrator’s sister, Caroline Sheppard, in her lurid gossipy way, always claimed his wife had murdered him.
In the year since her husband’s death, Mrs Ferrars had become very friendly with Roger Ackroyd, whose own wife had died leaving him to raise her son by a previous marriage i.e. his stepson, Captain Ralph Paton. They’d become close enough for Roger to have proposed marriage to her and she, on the second attempt, to accept.
Now, to his horror, Dr Sheppard hears Roger Ackroyd telling him that just the day before, Mrs Ferrars had confessed to him (Roger) that she did murder her husband, with poison, after years of drunken abuse. Not only that, but somebody found out about the murder and has been blackmailing her for a year.
Mrs Ferrars tells Roger all this but can’t bring herself to name the blackmailer. Then she kills herself. The next day Roger calls in the doctor and tells him everything but, even as they’re talking, the butler delivers the day’s mail which includes a letter from the suicided Mrs Ferrars. He opens the letter and starts to read it aloud to the doctor but when it gets to the bit which names the blackmailer he stops, then insists the doctor leaves.
A few hours later the doctor is home in bed when he gets a phone call telling him that Roger Ackroyd has been murdered and hurries over to Ackroyd’s house to find it is, indeed, true. So: who murdered Roger Ackroyd, and why, and who was blackmailing Mrs Ferrars? These are just the starting points of what develops into a story which some critics claim was Christie’s best and is regularly voted among the top crime novels ever written.
Where does Poirot come in?
The first quarter of the book is narrated by this Dr Sheppard with no mention or appearance of Poirot but mentions of a Mr Porrott who has moved into the house next to Sheppard’s, The Larches. Sheppard’s sister, Caroline, as the village gossip, claims to know about Porrott but in fact all that everyone knows is that he keeps himself to himself. We learn that he is literally cultivating his garden as, in one comic episode, he offers Dr Sheppard one of the huge marrows he has been cultivating.
It is only in Chapter 7, when the story is well underway, that one of the other characters (the murdered man’s niece, Flora) informs Sheppard of the true identity of his neighbour: that he is the world-famous private detective, that he moved to the village a year ago, that Roger knew about him but Poirot swore him to secrecy.
This raises several questions, the most obvious of which is: Why did Christie choose to have her famous detective character retire after just two novels? Specially seeing as he was destined to appear in over 30 further novels, two plays and over 50 short stories? Though she couldn’t have anticipated this at the time, she must have realised she had a makings of a recurring figure, so why retire him at virtually the start of his fictional career?
Anyway, once Poirot’s been introduced he quickly comes to dominate the narrative and the imaginative space of the novel, easily becoming the most intriguing and central figure, with his air of exaggerated self importance, his habit of referring to himself in the third person (as Napoleon notoriously did), and his complete domination of Dr Sheppard who is transformed from a reasonably capable and thoughtful local doctor into the kind of dim sidekick figure which Poirot appears to require.
Poirot’s self importance
‘See now, mademoiselle,’ he said very gently, ‘it is Papa Poirot who asks you this. The old Papa Poirot who has much knowledge and much experience. I would not seek to entrap you, mademoiselle. Will you not trust me?’ (Chapter 12)
He looked over his shoulder and raised one eyebrow quizzically. ‘An opened window,’ he said. ‘A locked door. A chair that apparently moved itself. To all three I say, ‘Why?’ and I find no answer.’ – He shook his head, puffed out his chest, and stood blinking at us. He looked ridiculously full of his own importance. It crossed my mind to wonder whether he was really any good as a detective. Had his big reputation been built up on a series of lucky chances? (Chapter 8)
‘Les femmes,’ generalized Poirot. ‘They are marvelous! They invent haphazard—and by miracle they are right. Not that it is that, really. Women observe subconsciously a thousand little details, without knowing that they are doing so. Their subconscious mind adds these little things together—and they call the result intuition. Me, I am very skilled in psychology. I know these things.’ He swelled his chest out importantly, looking so ridiculous, that I found it difficult not to burst out laughing. (Chapter 13)
‘It is useless to deny. Hercule Poirot knows.’ (Chapter 17)
‘A little idea of mine, that was all. Me, I am famous for my little ideas.’ (Chapter 18)
Where is Hastings?
Why is the novel being narrated by Dr Sheppard and not Captain Hastings? Because at the end of the previous novel in the series, The Murder on the Links’, with wild improbability, Hastings had gone off to live in South America with the woman he fell in love with during the novel, Dulcie Duveen.
For the first quarter of the novel Poirot doesn’t appear and everything is narrated by Dr Sheppard. Once Poirot has been introduced, Christie quickly has him assimilating Sheppard to the witness-and-sounding-board role vacated by Hastings.
‘You must have indeed been sent from the good God to replace my friend Hastings,’ he said, with a twinkle. ‘I observe that you do not quit my side.’ (Chapter 8)
‘Perhaps I’m intruding,” I said. ‘Not at all,’ cried Poirot heartily. ‘You and I, M. le docteur, we investigate this affair side by side. Without you I should be lost.’ (Chapter 10)
In other words, Poirot needs an idiot accomplice. Inside the fictional world of the novel, I suppose it may help Poirot to think and work things through, to have an imbecile constantly proposing completely erroneous theories. On a practical level, it also allows him to in effect be in two places at the same time whenever that’s required, sending Sheppard off to interview people while Poirot does something else, or wants to stay in the background.
Also, towards the end of the novel, Poirot pays Hastings a back-handed compliment and summary of his usefulness:
‘It is that there are moments when a great longing for my friend Hastings comes over me. That is the friend of whom I spoke to you—the one who resides now in the Argentine. Always, when I have had a big case, he has been by my side. And he has helped me—yes, often he has helped me. For he had a knack, that one, of stumbling over the truth unawares—without noticing it himself, bien entendu. At times he has said something particularly foolish, and behold that foolish remark has revealed the truth to me! And then, too, it was his practice to keep a written record of the cases that proved interesting.’ (Chapter 23)
But it may also be that Christie had grasped how much more entertaining the Hastings figure makes her books. He is a bit dim, a bit slow, and so acts as the reader’s entry into the fictional world of the novel, and into Poirot’s mind.
For all these reasons, as the novel progresses, Poirot consolidates Sheppard’s position as the Dr Watson-Captain Hastings substitute.
‘Do you really wish to aid me? To take part in this investigation?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ I said eagerly. ‘There’s nothing I should like better. You don’t know what a dull old fogey’s life I lead. Never anything out of the ordinary.’
‘Good, we will be colleagues then.’ (Chapter 10)
But as reassuringly slow-witted and dim as the original.
Call me dense if you like. I didn’t see. (Chapter 13)
The pleasure of familiarity
Fictional series featuring recurring figures are so enjoyable because it obviously feeds something deep in our psyches to meet the same characters again and again and get to learn their quirks and characteristics. All the world’s mythologies feature the same gods or heroes cropping up again and again, displaying the same trademark behaviour. Ancient drama featured stock characters who were given different names but always behaved in a reassuringly familiar and predictable manner (the young lovers, the disapproving father, the clever slave etc).
In a way, given the psychological reassurance they provide, it’s an oddity that so much of the literature in the interim between then and modern times didn’t feature recurring characters. On reflection, maybe it was a role taken by figures in the Christian mythology: most of the population from the Dark Ages to the late Victorian era were illiterate, and so their world of fictional characters was limited to an (admittedly quite large) roster of characters from the Old and New Testaments, along with stock characters from fairy tales and folk mythology.
All this changed (in Britain) with the increase in literacy triggered by the 1870 Education Act and the consequent explosion of genre literature from the 1880s and 1890s onwards, the creation of the sub-literary genres of adventure stories, horror, fantasy, science fiction and so on. And these provided fertile fields for the creation of thousands of characters which could be used in recurring adventures – first in the obvious detective stories, starting with Sherlock Holmes; then in a new, debased and industrialised form in comics – from the funnies of turn of the century American newspapers, through the invention of comic strip characters, DC (1934) and Marvel (1939) in the States, alongside comic strip characters in Europe such as Tintin in France/Belgium (1929).
All this was amplified in movies made with recurring characters (all those Sherlock Holmes movies starring Basil Rathbone), a device which was handed over to the new medium of television after the second war, across all possible genres – from comic to Westerns to science fiction. Recurring characters are easier for creators to work with, reassuring for audiences, and profitable.
Anyway, Poirot is one such protagonist, one such figure who went on to have a lengthy career in Christie’s hands, in an impressively long roster of novels and short stories, stretching from 1920 to 1972 – but after her death flourished in an apparently unstoppable stream of TV adaptations and movies, up to the current series of movies starring Kenneth Branagh.
So to come right back to this novel, it is part of the fun but also feeds something deep in us, is deeply reassuring, to feel we are in the presence of someone in control, in command of the situation, who can help us, who will always ensure that Right and Justice prevail.
Thus it is that Christie knew very well what she was doing, when she created his three or four salient characteristics, repeated them within the novels and across the novels, and hence the lovely reassuring entertainment-stroke-comfort that they provide.
The little man was leaning forward. His eyes shone with a queer green light. (Chapter 8)
Over the wall, to my left, there appeared a face. An egg-shaped head, partially covered with suspiciously black hair, two immense moustaches, and a pair of watchful eyes. It was our mysterious neighbour, Mr Porrott. (Chapter 3)
I looked at him inquiringly, but he began to fuss about a few microscopic drops of water on his coat sleeve. The man reminded me in some ways of a cat. His green eyes and his finicking habits. (Chapter 9)
Symmetry OCD
According to the internet:
Symmetry OCD is a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) characterized by a strong need for things to be perfectly aligned, arranged, or symmetrical. Individuals with symmetry OCD experience intense anxiety and distress when items are not correctly aligned, incomplete, or appear imperfect. This can lead to compulsions like repeatedly arranging objects, touching or tapping things, or even performing certain actions with both hands to achieve a sense of balance.
This is clearly what Poirot has:
I looked curiously at [Poirot]. He was rearranging a few objects on the table, setting them straight with precise fingers. His eyes were shining. (Chapter 13)
Poirot’s OCD is not so pronounced as to interfere with his everyday life, but Christie touches on it just frequently enough to keep us aware of it.
‘Now, I beg you, let us have everything of the most exact.’ (Poirot organising a reconstruction in Chapter 15)
And, importantly, his symmetry OCD is connected with Poirot’s desire for everything about a case to be arranged ‘just so’, for the facts and people’s statements to line up and make sense. Anything at all which doesn’t make sense, doesn’t fit the theory, jars with his putative narrative, troubles him.
‘But then it is possible after all—yes, certainly it is possible—but then—ah! I must rearrange my ideas. Method, order; never have I needed them more. Everything must fit in—in its appointed place—otherwise I am on the wrong tack.’
Again and again we see other people – Hastings, Giraud of the Sûreté, Japp of Scotland Yard (in other Poirot novels) and the local coppers – dismissing this or that detail as irrelevant, because it doesn’t fit with the theory they’ve devised and are imposing on the facts. But Poirot can’t allow this. This is why it’s the details that don’t make sense, don’t fit into an interpretive pattern, which trouble and interest him the most.
Thus a chair in the murdered man’s study had been moved sometime between the murder and the doctor and butler entering the room and discovering the body, an apparently small detail, but:
‘Raymond or Blunt must have pushed it back,’ I suggested. ‘Surely it isn’t important?’
‘It is completely unimportant,’ said Poirot. ‘That is why it is so interesting,’ he added softly.
(Chapter 7)
(I began to notice the importance of the word ‘seem’. Whenever the narrator says that Poirot ‘seems’ not to notice or not to care, or ‘seems’ to lose interest in a conversation with s suspect, or ‘seems’ to move on – that is almost infallibly a tell-tale sign that he has noticed something important.)
As to the importance of theory and interpretation in these novels, Poirot gives a handy quote:
‘Of facts, I keep nothing to myself. But to everyone his own interpretation of them.’ (Chapter 21)
Chimpanzees and gossip
Our village, King’s Abbot, is, I imagine, very much like any other village. Our big town is Cranchester, nine miles away. We have a large railway station, a small post office, and two rival general stores. Able-bodied men are apt to leave the place early in life, but we are rich in unmarried ladies and retired military officers. Our hobbies and recreations can be summed up in the one word, ‘gossip‘. (Chapter 2)
Gossip amounts to speculation about other people in a social group, or known in wider society. Gossip is:
casual or unconstrained conversation or reports about other people, typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true… idle talk or rumour, especially about the personal or private affairs of others…
My understanding of the hierarchies of ape groups, and especially chimpanzee society, is that they are incredibly complex, and that survival requires continual assessment of who is the alpha male, who his females and children are. Constant awareness of who’s on their way up, who’s on their way down, who’s mating with who, whose children are eligible or valid members of the in-group, and so on.
Everyone who writes about chimp social hierarches makes the obvious point that they are directly comparable to human social hierarchies, especially in what anthropologists know of our earliest hunter-gatherer societies.
Except that, unlike chimps, we can talk, and so can assess our own and everyone else’s place in the hierarchy at length and in mind-boggling detail. Human gossip can be seen as an extension of the same chimp-like faculty. Gossip is speculation about people’s activities and motives: ‘Are they having an affair? Why did they suddenly sell the house and move?’ etc.
To come back to the novel in hand, it isn’t difficult to see the genre of the detective story as a kind of intensification of the chimp strand in human nature or the human mind. Unlike chimps who live in the animal present, humans with their vastly bigger mental and symbolic and linguistic abilities, can range far and wide over the past, analyse the present, and speculate about the future. And when all this energy goes into speculating about the past, present and future of individuals – are they on the way up, or down? who stands to gain and who stands to lose? are the children – the next generation – overthrowing their parents, for power or money or love? who’s mating with who? – all this is gossip. And it is gossip which the narrator, in the first chapter of the book, goes out of his way to say is the chief recreation and pastime of everyone in his village.
All of which helps us to see, to understand, that what the narrator calls ‘gossip’, is in a sense, central to the whole genre of the detective story. Because what does a detective story consist of except endless speculation about people, their characters, qualities, and extravagant theories about their possible motivations and actions. The detective story is gossip on steroids. In the detective novel the common human urge to speculate about what people do and why goes into overdrive.
Which is one of the several psychological gratifications it offers (along with the reassuring comfort of meeting recurring, familiar and dependable characters, mentioned above).
The post-war era
Christie was born in 1890 and so was 28 when the Great War ended and 30 when her first detective novel was published. She was, in other words, from the pre-War generation and so these early novels record some of the startling social changes of the post-war era.
The 1920s woman
One of these was the striking new freedoms claimed by young women (presumably mostly middle class young women), the short haircuts, short skirts, lipstick and unabashed smoking in public.
The things young women read nowadays and profess to enjoy positively frighten me.
(Dr Sheppard, Chapter 4)
‘Flora is like all these young girls nowadays, with no veneration for their betters and thinking they know best on every subject under the sun.’
(Caroline Sheppard, Chapter 17)
Mahjong
Another was Christie’s keeping up with the new decade’s enthusiasm for games and activities. I commented on how the preceding novel, ‘The Murder on The Links’, drags in the game of golf which existed beforehand but underwent a great burst of popularity in the 1920s, with the spread of clubs and courses across the UK. (To be honest, the topic feels rather dragged into the book since the murder doesn’t actually take place on a golf course and isn’t carried out with a golf club or something colourful like that, but just with a common or garden dagger.)
And so she does something similar with the Chinese game of mahjong. This became a fad or craze in the West immediately after the First World War. The first Mahjong sets sold in the U.S. were sold by Abercrombie & Fitch starting in 1920, which was also the year that Joseph Park Babcock published his book ‘Rules of Mah-Jongg’, the earliest version of Mahjong known in America – and which was also, of course, the publication year of the first Poirot novel, ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’. The game quickly spread across America and to Britain.
All of which explains why Christie was being very up-to-date when she devoted an entire chapter (Chapter 16) to a game of mah jong held at Dr Sheppard’s house, featuring himself, his sister Caroline, bluff Colonel Carter and local gossip Miss Ganett as the players.
The ostensible purpose of the chapter is for all four characters to air their ‘theories’ about the murder of Roger Ackroyd (because, as I’ve discussed at length, these kinds of detective stories are just as much or more about the elaboration and assessment of different theories about murders, as they are about the murders themselves) but it’s done against the backdrop of a game of mahjong which doesn’t exactly explain the rules, but gives enough detail about the names of the tiles, the different hands and strategy, to begin to give you a feel for the game.
It’s also a funny scene, as the theories about the murder are juxtaposed with the players’ increasingly bad-tempered playing of the game and criticising each other. Surely millions of readers before me have pointed this out, but Christie is a very enjoyable comic writer. It’s mainly for the comedy that I read her.
Freud
And then another fad which swept across the West in various forms of bastardisation and simplification, Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis, namechecked in this brief exchange between Poirot and the police inspector to indicate Poirot’s openness to new thinking and the police’s innate conservatism.
‘Then there is the psychology of a crime. One must study that.’
‘Ah!’ said the inspector, ‘you’ve been bitten with all this psycho-analysis stuff? Now, I’m a plain man——’ (Chapter 8)
But later Poirot speaks in such a way as to indicate that he accepts psychoanalysis’s fundamental premise: the notion that the human mind is divided into a conscious and an unconscious part and that the unconscious part is often working, creating ideas and suppositions which the conscious mind isn’t aware that it’s doing.
‘Les femmes,’ generalized Poirot. ‘They are marvellous! They invent haphazard—and by miracle they are right. Not that it is that, really. Women observe subconsciously a thousand little details, without knowing that they are doing so. Their subconscious mind adds these little things together—and they call the result intuition.’ . (Chapter 13)
‘I was watching your face and you were not—like Inspector Raglan—startled and incredulous.’ I thought for a minute or two. ‘Perhaps you are right,’ I said at last. ‘All along I’ve felt that Flora was keeping back something—so the truth, when it came, was subconsciously expected. (Chapter 20)
And most plainly of all:
‘It explains, too,’ said Poirot, ‘why Major Blunt thought it was you who were in the study. Such scraps as came to him were fragments of dictation, and so his subconscious mind deduced that you were with him. His conscious mind was occupied with something quite different…’ (Chapter 23)
Poor old Ackroyd. I’m always glad that I gave him a chance. I urged him to read that letter before it was too late. Or let me be honest—didn’t I subconsciously realize that with a pig-headed chap like him, it was my best chance of getting him not to read it? (Chapter 27)
Like lots of writers and artists, Christie realised that you don’t have to understand the full complexity of Freud’s theory, for its basic outline to be very useful in writing, in creating characters and analysing their psychology and motivation.
Cocaine and heroin
Golf, mahjong, psychoanalysis – and Christie adds a fourth to her suite of topical references, cocaine! Roger Ackroyd’s housemaid is a prim and proper woman, Miss Russell. It’s only half way through the book that we discover (in a typical digression designed to throw us off the scent) that she has an illegitimate son, Charles Kent, who’s gone completely off the rails and become a drug addict.
Poirot first suspects this when he discovers a ‘quill’, a goose quill i.e. the hollow stem of a goose feather, in Roger Ackroyd’s summer house where, it slowly emerges, the housekeeper had had a bad-tempered encounter with her ne’er-do-well son on the night of Ackroyd’s murder. Poirot knows that drug addicts in America use these quills to snort their drug.
In fact there’s a quibble or mild confusion about drugs because when Miss Russell goes to consult Dr Sheppard about drugs, she mentions cocaine because she’d seen a piece about it in that morning’s newspaper. She does this because she doesn’t in fact know or understand which drug her son is addicted to. But the goose quill gives Poirot the more specific evidence that it’s actually heroin or, as he says, using the latest slang, ‘snow’.
He held out to me the little quill. I looked at it curiously. Then a memory of something I had read stirred in me. Poirot, who had been watching my face, nodded.
‘Yes, heroin ‘snow.’ Drug-takers carry it like this, and sniff it up the nose.’
‘Diamorphine hydrochloride,’ I murmured mechanically.
‘This method of taking the drug is very common on the other side. Another proof, if we wanted one, that the man came from Canada or the States.’ (Chapter 13)
And later, when discussing the movements of an unnamed stranger who was seen entering Ackroyd’s grounds:
‘It was fairly certain that he did go to the summer-house because of the goose quill. That suggested at once to my mind a taker of drugs—and one who had acquired the habit on the other side of the Atlantic where sniffing ‘snow’ is more common than in this country. The man whom Dr Sheppard met had an American accent, which fitted in with that supposition…’ (Chapter 23)
Golf, mahjong, psychoanalysis and heroin, an impressive roster of up-to-the-minute topics for 1926.
Heightism
Ackroyd’s housekeeper – ‘a tall woman, handsome but forbidding in appearance.’
Ursula Bourne – ‘A tall girl, with a lot of brown hair rolled tightly away at the back of her neck, and very steady grey eyes.’
Mrs Folliott – ‘She was a tall woman, with untidy brown hair, and a very winning smile.’
Kent, the suspect – ‘He was a young fellow, I should say not more than twenty-two or three. Tall, thin, with slightly shaking hands, and the evidences of considerable physical strength somewhat run to seed.’
In this world of tall people, great emphasis is placed on Poirot’s shortness and smallness.
The strange little man seemed to read my thoughts… My little neighbour nodded… He seemed an understanding little man… The little man went on with an almost grandiloquent smirk… ‘To see that funny little man?’ exclaimed Caroline… ‘I accept,’ said the little man quietly… The little detective shook his head at me gravely… The little man was leaning forward. His eyes shone with a queer green light… ‘Admirable,’ declared the little man, rubbing his hands.
You get the picture. Maybe all the emphasis on Poirot’s littleness is to emphasise his reliance not on brute strength but on brains. The key word, ‘little’, being used both for Poirot’s stature, but also part of his favourite phrase to describe his key piece of equipment for solving crimes.
The secretary [Geoffrey Raymond] was debonair as ever. ‘What’s the great idea?’ he said, laughing. ‘Some scientific machine? Do we have bands round our wrists which register guilty heart-beats? There is such an invention, isn’t there?’
‘I have read of it, yes,’ admitted Poirot. ‘But me, I am old-fashioned. I use the old methods. I work only with the little grey cells.’ (Chapter 23)
Roger and Edmund
http://www.crazyoik.co.uk/workshop/edmund_wilson_on_crime_fiction.htm
ITV
ITV dramatised most of the Poirot novels and short stories in their TV series starring David Suchet. ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ was dramatised as series 7, episode 1.
Credit
‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1926 by John Lane. References are to the 1966 Fontana paperback edition.
Related links
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- 1920s reviews
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