24. Agatha Christie:

 

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

written: 1926

(245 pages)

 

read in May 2014

verdict: *** LIKE

 

This time we broke for once with our habit of choosing an obscure author previously unknown to us and went for a book by the world-famous Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie (1890-1976). Since Wikipedia informed us that The murder of Roger Ackroyd had been voted "best crime novel ever", naturally our choice fell on that one. We were more than eager to find out about its "surprise ending" and couldn't wait to start the book.

 

And it all began very promising: there were loads of characters with plenty of dialogue, which always makes a story fun to read aloud. The language also was really easy, which came as a welcome break after the quite difficult read of Biély's Pétersbourg.

 

The murder of Roger Ackroyd is by no means "high literature", but we didn't expect this anyway, since an author who has written as many books as Christie cannot achieve this feat without relying on formulaic writing. This is not necessarily negative, as we found out that so-called "high literature" is often completely over-rated and "popular fiction" does not have to be synonymous with "bad writing". So also here, the book procured us an enjoyable weekend, and we finished it in three sessions.

 

All throughout the book, we had fun guessing who the murderer might be. Every single character was a number one suspect. Christie really took pains to give each of them a good motive, but somehow we didn't think any of them had it in them to really do the deed. Right at the beginning, we even suspected the narrator for a little while, but then we forgot about that again. So it was quite a highlight to find out, in the end, that the narrator was indeed exceedingly unreliable and – who would have thought it – the murderer. This device of the "unreliable narrator" made it of course quite difficult for the reader to guess along with the detective, which is in our opinion what is most fun about a crime story. But unfortunately Poirot is a really annoying know-it-all, just like Sherlock Holmes. They both like to hold back all information about the perpetrator until the end, when they launch into an endless monologue to explain everything to their awe-struck audience.

 

So to sum it all up, it had been fun to read one of her books, but it's not as if she had us hooked into reading another one after this experience. Not at all like John Braine's Room at the Top, which, as soon as we had finished it, made us log into amazon marketplace to purchase the sequel Life at the Top, in order to find out more about the protagonist's life.

 

Therefore, we first decided to only give an OK for the book this time, but after some careful consideration, we figured that it nevertheless still merited a LIKE, since it was a good read after all, and should rank a bit higher than the other books that only received an OK from us.