Is the Roger Ackroyd Twist Cheating? The 1926 Controversy, Explained

Spoilers for the solution of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, throughout.

The complaint is a hundred years old and it has never quite gone away: Agatha Christie cheated. The story is told by Dr James Sheppard, the village doctor who assists Poirot through twenty-six chapters, and in the twenty-seventh he explains that he killed Roger Ackroyd himself. Readers in 1926 called that a swindle. The useful thing about the charge is that it is checkable, because the novel is short and every sentence of it was written by the man being accused.

• ✅He never writes a false sentence. The trick is entirely in what the sentences leave out.
• ✅The fair-play rulebooks did not exist yet. All three were written after this novel, in 1928, 1929 and 1930.
• ✅The book flags its own method, in the confession, with a joke about a row of stars.
• ✅The idea came from two other people, one of them a future admiral of the fleet.

Here is the case in full, starting with what the last chapter actually admits. If you would rather test the trick from inside it, the playable Murder of Roger Ackroyd stages the unmasking as a scene you can play from either side.

✍️ What the confession chapter actually admits

Chapter XXVII is called Apologia, and it is not an apology. Sheppard sits down at five in the morning to finish the manuscript he has been writing throughout the novel, which he had intended to publish as the history of one of Poirot's failures. Instead it has to become a confession, and he is visibly pleased with the quality of his own prose. He even quotes himself back, picks out his neatest paragraph, and explains the joinery.

The passage he chooses is the one covering the ten minutes in which the murder happened. The letters came in at twenty minutes to nine; it was just on ten minutes to nine when he left, the letter still unread; he hesitated with his hand on the door handle, wondering if there was anything he had left undone. Every clause of that is true. Then he supplies his own commentary on it.

“All true, you see. But suppose I had put a row of stars after the first sentence! Would somebody then have wondered what exactly happened in that blank ten minutes?”

That is the whole method, stated by the culprit, in a book that then hands the reader the line to check it against. A row of stars is the typographical convention for a gap in a narrative. He is pointing out that the gap was always there, unmarked, and that the reader filled it in without being asked to.

The playable book runs the unmasking as its own doorway: sit across from Poirot and keep writing the version where nothing happened, or put the row of stars in yourself. Role-play The Murder of Roger Ackroyd →

📜 The rulebooks were written after the novel

The charge is usually phrased as a rule violation, and the chronology does not support it. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was published in June 1926. The three documents that codified fair play in detective fiction all came afterwards, and not by a little: S. S. Van Dine's Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories appeared in the American Magazine in September 1928, Ronald Knox codified his decalogue of ten commandments in 1929, and the Detection Club, whose members agreed to keep Knox's commandments in their own writing, was formed in 1930.

Christie was a founding member of that club, joining an organisation whose first president was G. K. Chesterton and whose initiation oath was written by Dorothy L. Sayers. So the accurate version of the accusation is stranger and more interesting than the usual one. She did not break a written rule. She wrote the book that made people feel a rule was needed, and then she helped write the rules.

What did exist in 1926 was a convention, and the reviews prove the convention was real, because they reached for it immediately. The Scotsman's notice worked out that readers would feel sold up, fairly or unfairly, and put its finger on the exact mechanism: everyone in the story is hiding something, and in the end it is the doctor who turns out to be responsible for the largest bit of reticence. That is a 1926 reviewer describing omission as a technique, in print, without calling it a foul.

🎩 He never lies. He omits.

The distinction sounds like a lawyer's defence and it survives contact with the text. Go back through the manuscript with the ending in hand and the pattern is consistent: the doctor reports his own movements accurately, times them accurately, and stops the sentence one clause early. The telephone call that brings him back to the house is the clearest case, and it is sharper than it first looks. What the page records is the telephone ringing at a quarter past ten, his own half of the conversation, and then the words he shouted up the stairs to his sister: Parker telephoning, from Fernly, they have just found Roger Ackroyd murdered. Every one of those is an accurate record. The sentence he shouted was false. He lies out loud, to a person, inside quotation marks, and then writes the lie down exactly as he told it.

His best piece of craftsmanship is four words long. Describing what he did on finding the body, he writes that he did what little had to be done, and then, in the confession, congratulates himself on the phrasing. What little had to be done was removing the machine that had been faking his alibi and pushing a chair back to where it belonged. The sentence is honest. It is also a sentence a reader skims, because doctors do things at crime scenes.

This is why the argument keeps being had. A lie in the narration would be a genuine breach, because a reader has no way to detect it. An omission is detectable in principle, and readers who go back a second time find the gaps sitting there in plain sight. The critic John Goddard tested the charge at book length and concluded it fails. Robert Barnard, no great enthusiast, allowed that apart from the solution this is a fairly conventional Christie, and then admitted the apart was enormous.

✉️ Where the idea came from

Not from Christie, and she said so. In her 1977 autobiography she credited her brother-in-law James Watts, of Abney Hall, with suggesting a detective novel in which the criminal turned out to be the Dr Watson figure, an idea she called remarkably original. That is the shape of the whole book in one sentence, proposed to her by a relative.

Then, in March 1924, she received an unsolicited letter from Lord Louis Mountbatten, forwarded via The Sketch magazine, which had been publishing her short stories. He had notes for a story built on the same premise. Christie acknowledged the letter, thought about it, and wrote the novel to a plot of her own. In December 1969, having just seen The Mousetrap, Mountbatten wrote to her again to mention his letter of forty-five years earlier, and she replied acknowledging the part he had played.

None of that is a mark against the book, and it is worth saying why. Two people suggested a premise. What the novel is actually made of is the execution: twenty-six chapters written in a voice that is helpful, professionally calm, faintly amused by its neighbours, and true in every particular. The idea was borrowed. The nerve was not.

The full 1926 text is free at Project Gutenberg, and Chapter XXVII runs about six pages. For how the murder itself was actually done, and what Poirot does about it, the ending is set out step by step here.