Hercule Poirot, a Tunisian dagger and an evening of Mah Jong: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Secret Life of Books

The three best-selling authors of all time are, in order, God, Shakespeare and Agatha Christie. Exact figures are hard to know, but the gulf between Christie and the second division is big enough to guarantee her place. She has sold over 2 billion books (and just to make that number easier to comprehend, that’s two thousand million). There are a handful of contenders for her greatest book overall, but The Murder of Roger Ackroyd - first serialised exactly 100 years ago in 1925 - is usually amongst them.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd tells the story of murderous happenings in the English country village of Kings Abbot, peaking with the mysterious death of local squire Roger Ackroyd. By happy circumstance, the famous detective Hercule Poirot has recently retired to the village. Already bored stiff by his attempts to grow marrows in his garden, he leaps at the chance of solving a crime, slowly revealing the hidden desires and secrets of his suspects before the grand reveal.

Sophie and Jonty turn detective too to work out why this relatively short book with its action never ranging far from a small village has proven so successful and influential. It has been adapted many times for radio, television and film with Charles Laughton, Orson Welles and (of course) David Suchet playing Poirot. Its influence on popular culture is much broader, inspiring everything from the board game Cluedo to films like Knives Out.

In this episode, Sophie and Jonty going to reveal the secrets behind Agatha Christie’s unique take on detective fiction, tell the origin story of her most famous creation Hercule Poirot, and show how the publication of the book was an inciting incident for her infamous disappearance a few months afterwards. Their investigations take them surfing with Agatha in Hawaii, into speculations about the origin of the Wagon Wheel biscuit and, of course, some truly dreadful impersonations of Hercule Poirot.

SPOILER ALERT! We reveal the identity of the murderer, but only in the final part of the episode and give clear warning before we do.

BOOKS/FILMS READ OR REFERRED TO:

The Life and Times of Hercule Poirot (199) by Anne Hart

Agatha Christie (2022) by Lucy Worsley

Who Killed Roger Ackroyd (1998) by Pierre Bayard

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd radio play (1939) by Orson Welles

One Thousand And One Nights

The Chalk Circle (14th century)

Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (18th century)

The Murder in the Rue Morgue (1841) by Edgar Allan Poe

Oliver Twist (1838) by Charles Dickens

Bleak House (1853) by Charles Dickens

The Woman in White (1860) by Wilkie Collins

The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins

The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1921) by Agatha Christie

The Wasteland (1922) by TS Eliot

Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce

Cane (1923) by Jean Toomer

Mrs Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf

The Weary Blues (1926) by Langston Hughes

The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Ernest Hemingway

Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker

Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad

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