I thought I'd start with a classic Agatha Christie novel, because that's where a lot of my lit-love started. While far from her most famous book (see: Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, or And Then There Were None), The Murder of Roger Ackroyd set a standard for the locked room British style of mystery writing that has certainly never been surpassed. It is also the lone Christie novel on the List (which I'll designate with a capital 'L' throughout this blog).
When it was first published in 1926, Christie was a young author with only 2 or 3 other novels under her belt. It featured her detective, the retired Belgian police officer Hercule Poirot. Poirot was a mass of idiosyncrasies and was very much in the vein of popular fiction detectives of the time. He famously relied on the 'little grey cells' in his brain to solve puzzles that made fools of lesser mortals.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd concerns exactly what the title would cause one to expect. Ackroyd, a wealthy man in a small British village, is found murdered in his study. Poirot, who has recently moved to the village in retirement to grow vegetable marrows, is intrigued by the case and soon discovers there are no shortage of suspects and motives. However, there appears to be a major lack of opportunity to commit the crime in between the time Ackroyd was last seen and the discovery of his body.
Christie stymied me most of the time, but this was one of the few novels that actually took my breath away upon finding out the identity of the killer. Some critics have dismissed the ending as a dirty trick, but a careful reading reveals that all of the clues are laid out during the narrative. Christie devised any number of incredibly clever stories, but a reader would be hard pressed to find one trickier than The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
