The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Hercule Poirot) - Softcover

Buch 4 von 38: Hercule Poirot

Christie, Agatha

 
9780593639580: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Hercule Poirot)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593639588 ISBN 13: 9780593639580
Verlag: Signet Book, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

This Signet Classics edition of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd includes an exclusive Introduction by Ruth Ware.

In the small English village of King’s Abbot, a widow’s suicide has stirred up dreadful rumors of blackmail and deception. Most shocking of all is the subsequent murder of her lover Roger Ackroyd, stabbed to death in his own study by an unknown assailant. There are suspects and motives aplenty, and rumors that his neighbor, the recently retired detective Hercule Poirot, doesn’t have a clue who did the dastardly deed....

Setting up the traditional rules of mystery only to shatter them, Christie delivers her most famously shocking detective novel. As Dorothy L. Sayers said, “Christie fooled you [all]...”

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dame Agatha Christie is the most-widely published author of all time. In a career that spanned more than fifty years, Christie wrote eighty novels and short story collections, nineteen plays—one of which, The Mousetrap, is the longest-running play in history—and five non-fiction books including her autobiography. In addition she wrote six romantic novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. Two of the characters she created, the ingenious Belgian Hercule Poirot and the irrepressible and relentless Miss Jane Marple, became world-famous detectives. Agatha Christie achieved Britain’s highest honor when she was made a Dame of the British Empire. She died in 1976.

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Introduction

How to begin an introduction like this? "Welcome, dear reader" sounds plummy and proprietorial, particularly given it's not actually my book. "Hi!" sounds a little informal, and almost certainly not an address Agatha Christie would have approved of. If I plunge straight in with my thoughts on the literary significance of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, that feels a little egocentric-you didn't come here for a lecture after all. I think one thing is certain, however; given you are picking up this book (particularly if you've already read it and are buying another copy as a gift or just because you can't resist this delicious new edition), then you have good taste, and we already have something in common. So I'll choose this: "Hello, friend."

If you're settling down with this book for the fourth, fifth, or even tenth time, then there's a good chance we're kindred spirits. But if you're reading this book for the first time, I envy you. I can't remember when I first read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, although it was probably as a young teen. I began reading Christie around the age of nine or ten, and she was one of the first proper "adult" writers whose work I tackled, the perfect combination of grown-up but not too daunting.

Along with, I suspect, many readers of my generation, I consumed the books alongside the superb TV adaptations of the late eighties and early nineties. Joan Hickson, who played Miss Marple for eight years, was "my" Marple, and David Suchet, who played Hercule Poirot for an astonishing twenty-four years, from 1989 to 2013, was very much "my" Poirot. The adaptations were shown in the prime-time evening slot, usually midweek, and I have cozy, nostalgic memories of being curled up on the sofa alongside my mother, doing my homework to the sound of the well-remembered theme music.

I read the books sometimes in advance of the adaptations, sometimes after, and my image of both detectives was irrevocably shaped by their on-screen portrayals; but one thing is certain: I read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd cold, without ever having seen a dramatization.

I am so glad that I did, because it's a novel that really repays going into it blind, without spoilers, and more than that, it's a novel that no TV version could ever hope to equal-too much of the reveal lies in the unique way the book is written; what we see, whose thoughts we share, the exact perspective on events that Christie allows us. A good adaptation (and the 2000 David Suchet version is good) captures some of that, but not all, and I don't think it could possibly hope to convey the particular shock of the reveal at the end of the novel.

It is at this point that I'm going to stop-and ask anyone who hasn't read the book to pause here, read the novel, and return when you've done so. If you want, you can even fold the page over to keep your place; I'm not going to judge, assuming you've bought the book. But from this point onwards, I'm going to be discussing spoilers-and this is a novel you can only read once in the way Christie wanted you to.

That's not to say it isn't a novel that bears rereading. It absolutely is, and I must have read it half a dozen times myself, probably more, finding something new and clever each time. But I would not deny anyone that first, blank-slate experience for the world.

Okay. It's just us now-the people who've read the book before, yes?

Good. Because I want to talk about what makes The Murder of Roger Ackroyd so shocking the first time you read it-so groundbreaking, even.

The issue, of course, is the way The Murder of Roger Ackroyd breaks the rules.

Ah. Those rules. We all know them-all crime writers at any rate, and probably a good chunk of readers, too. Even someone who's never encountered the originals could probably draw up a fairly good version of them, just based on the unwritten codes of classic crime. They are as follows (quoted verbatim from The Best Detective Stories of 1928, Knox and Harrington, eds. Published by Horace Liveright):

The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.

All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.

Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.

No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.

No Chinaman must figure in the story. ["No racist stereotypes," in other words.]

No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.

The detective himself must not commit the crime.

The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover.

The "sidekick" of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.

Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

They are, of course, the famous Knox Commandments or Rules of Fair Play, drawn up by one of the first members of the Detection Club, Ronald Knox, and adopted by its members as part of their creed.

Membership of the Detection Club reads like a Who's Who of the Golden Age of crime fiction. G. K. Chesterton was the very first president. Dorothy L. Sayers wrote the oath members swore when they joined. The first American member was John Dickson Carr. Writers were selected to join by invitation and underwent a fanciful initiation ritual, which included promising that "your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God."

Agatha Christie presumably signed on to these rules-she was, after all, one of the founding members of the club, and served as president from 1957 to 1976, the longest standing president thus far. And yet it's striking how many times she broke them over the course of her career, perhaps never more deliberately than in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

The rules were of course written tongue in cheek-they were never meant to be binding commandments. But there are times, particularly with this book, when Christie seems to be rebelling at the very idea, starting with the first rule, which was regarded at the time as the most essential to the notion of fair play with the reader: "The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know."

That, of course, is the big reveal of Roger Ackroyd: that Dr. Sheppard, the slightly pompous, mild-mannered, Watson-ish narrator-presented to us as a kind of successor to Poirot's "dear Hastings"-is in fact a cold- blooded killer of extraordinary arrogance.

It's not the only rule Christie breaks, though. Numbers two and three-ghosts and secret passages-she wisely leaves well alone.  But number four, "No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end," is toyed with in a way that seems almost mischievous. First Sheppard's sister, Caroline, introduces the idea of poison, asserting (correctly as it turns out) that the woman Roger Ackroyd hoped to marry, the widowed Mrs. Ferrars, poisoned her first husband. Caroline is right, as we find out fairly quickly-but not before Roger Ackroyd's housekeeper, the austere Miss Russell, has introduced a diversion, faking a painful knee in order to question Dr. Sheppard about "certain poisons so rare as to baffle detection."

"The essence of a detective story," Dr. Sheppard tells her...

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Verlag
Signet Book
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593639588
ISBN 13 
9780593639580
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
358
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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