Agatha Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd: Written by Mary Westmacott’s Alternate Personality

This Hercule Poirot mystery is one of Agatha Christie’s most celebrated and analyzed novels. It is famous—some would say, notorious—for being a detective story with an unreliable narrator.

I am, if not the only one, then certainly one of the few, to have read it shortly after reading two novels by Mary Westmacott, Agatha Christie’s pseudonym (see previous posts). This juxtaposition led me to notice a peculiar difference: The two Westmacott novels had characters with whom it was easy to sympathize or empathize, but The Murder of Roger Ackroyd had characters who were strange.

The main Westmacott characters were like real people with real feelings. In Unfinished Portrait, Celia had a touching relationship with her mother. Even the villain, her unfaithful husband, was at least understandable in terms of common human emotions. In Absent in the Spring, I could sympathize with both Joan—who didn’t understand herself or her family, but who always tried to do the right thing—and her long-suffering husband.

The main Christie characters are the narrator, Dr. Sheppard, the village physician; his spinster sister, Caroline, with whom he lives; Hercule Poirot, a famous detective, who has recently retired to this quaint English village; the wealthy victim, Roger Ackroyd; and the obvious suspects, Ackroyd’s family, friends, and employees.

If I had not just read the Westmacott novels, in which the characters are portrayed with sensitivity and psychological understanding, I might have accepted the Christie novel’s world at face value. After all, it is a plot-driven, murder mystery, detective story. But even given the genre, its characters are remarkably strange and two-dimensional.

For example, Caroline Sheppard is an amateur detective, with a network of informants throughout the village (household staff, milkmen, etc.). Much is made of how she always knows what has happened before everyone else does. Indeed, in later Christie novels, she became Miss Marple. Yet in this novel, she is depicted as living with the murderer, her brother, but being one of the last to know.

In a Hercule Poirot Mystery, like this, the most admirable character should be Hercule Poirot. But at the end of this novel, the night before Poirot will expose the murderer to the police—and when he has just made it explicitly clear to the murderer that this will happen tomorrow morning—the author has Poirot suggest to the murderer that he might prefer to overdose with sleeping pills tonight, and so avoid tomorrow’s messy unpleasantness for himself and his family. This portrays Poirot as having a greater sense of neatness than of justice.

In short, the world of Mary Westmacott has people with normal human feelings, which may get tragic or messy, but which are sympathetic and make sense. In contrast, the world of Agatha Christie (at least, in this novel) is a kind of dystopia in which people are strange.

This illustrates that pseudonyms may be used by novelists to accommodate the existence in the writer of more than one distinct narrative voice; in other words, multiple narrative personalities.

Agatha Christie. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd: A Hercule Poirot Mystery [1926]. New York, Black Dog & Leventhal, [?].