Running Commentary 2/17/2025

• Chapters 1-3
• • The setting is a small England town. The narrator is Dr. James Shepard. He has a sister, Caroline, and Hercule Poirot is his new neighbor.
  • Roger Ackroyd is an industrialist, the riches man in the little town. He has a stepson, Capt. Ralph Paton, who is apparently involved with his niece, Flora Ackroyd.
• 4-6
• • Flora and Ralph announce their engagement.
  • Roger Ackroyd has a friend, Maj. Harold Blunt, who is a big game hunter.
  • Ackroyd tells the doctor that Mrs. Farrar, whom he had recently examined after an apparent fatal overdose of barbiturates, had been in love with Ackroyd; they meant to marry as soon as her period of grieving for her late husband was done. Ackroyd broke the engagement when Farrar admitted to having killed her husband (who was abusive) and asked for help with a blackmailer who knows what she did. After he broke things off, she killed herself. She left Ackroyd a letter, perhaps naming the person who had been blackmailing her.
  • That night, the doctor gets a phone call supposedly from Ackroyd’s butler, saying that Ackroyd has been murdered. When the doctor arrives, the butler says he made no such call, but they find Ackroyd has indeed been fatally stabbed in his study, seemingly shortly after Flora wished him goodnight.
  • The letter has disappeared. The butler knows Ackroyd was investigating the blackmail, and told the police so.
  • Ackroyd was killed with a very ornate, sharp dagger, a gift from Major Blunt. There are clear fingerprints on the handle.
  • The police suspect Ackroyd’s butler, but the doctor and Caroline doubt this.
• 7-9
• • The doctor was reluctant to bring Poirot in; he tries to dissuade Flora and Caroline from bringing the case to him four times.
  • Flora receives a significant inheritance from her uncle’s estate.
  • A chair in Ackroyd’s study was out of place when the butler and the doctor found Ackroyd dead; it was put back in place when the police arrived.
  • Poirot finds several clues:
  • • a goose quill and a scrap of starched cloth in an outbuilding in the garden.
    • a woman’s wedding ring, engraved with “From R., March 13th”, in a goldfish pond.
  • An Inspector Raglan arrives and suspects Ralph of the crime. Ralph is away at this time.
  • The fingerprint on the dagger does not match the butler’s, the secretary’s, or the doctor’s.
• 10-12
• • Ralph stands to inherit the bulk of Ackroyd’s fortune. The housekeeper also inherited some money.
  • A housemaid, Ursula Borne, had recently been fired after disarranging some papers on Ackroyd’s desk. He was unreasonably angry about this. (It’s possible she was dismissed for another reason, but this is her story given to Poirot.)
  • £40 of cash is missing from Ackroyd’s room.
  • Poirot says every fact he’s uncovered so far points to Ralph as the killer, but he will continue to investigate for Flora’s sake.
  • The doctor checks up on Ursula’s previous employment at Poirot’s request, but is told nothing useful before he is asked to leave. While he was gone, Poirot spoke with Caroline about the doctor’s patients. Poirot was very interested in his treatment of Ackroyd’s housekeeper. Caroline believes he suspects the housekeeper.
  • Poirot determines, and is verified correct, that the fingerprints on the dagger were Ackroyd’s own, applied to confuse the investigation.
  • Poirot appeals to Flora, and then to the other members of Ackroyd’s house, to say where Ralph is if they know. none come forward. Poirot tells the gathered people that he knows they’re all concealing something or another from him, which is frustrating his pursuit of the truth in the case.
• 13-15
• • Poirot accepts the doctor’s testimony that there was a mysterious stranger inquiring how to get to Fernly, as his presence was corroborated by other witnesses.
  • The stranger spoke with a slight American or Canadian accent; Flora and her mother had lived in Canada.
  • The stranger apparently went to the outbuilding, not the main house, and met with someone there.
  • The doctor proposes to Poirot that the stranger and the butler were in league as blackmailers and that the stranger came in through the window that Ralph had left open and killed Ackroyd when the blackmail was found out. Poirot says this does not account for the missing money or the chair.
  • Poirot says he believed Ralph is innocent despite having three motives to kill Ackroyd.
  • 1. he may have been the blackmailer.
    2. he may have worried his uncle would discover some other trouble he was in.
    3. he may have just wanted the inheritance.
  • The doctor is called in to treat Flora’s mother, who askes if he could explain to Poirot that she was in debt and had been in Ackroyd’s desk to find his will, so she could determine her prospects. Mrs. Ackroyd was the one to leave the drawer from which the dagger was taken open.
  • The doctor wonders if the starched scrap might have come from the housekeeper’s handkerchief.
  • The parlor maid says Ralph out to come back. She asks when Ackroyd was killed, and seems very sad to learn that he died no earlier than at a quarter to ten, when Flora had wished him goodnight.
  • Poirot inquires to the color of Ralph’s boots. He expects them to be brown, but they are black.
  • Ackroyd’s secretary comes to Poirot and admits to having had money troubles before receiving £500 in Ackroyd’s will. Poirot thanks him for his honesty.
  • Poirot points out that Maj. Blunt is one of the few people there that night who would not benefit financially from Ackroyd’s death.
• 16-19
• • During a game of mahjong, the doctor reveals to Caroline that Poirot had found a wedding ring in the pond. Caroline speculates that it was given to Ackroyd to his housekeeper. She insists that it couldn’t have been from Ralph to Flora; she says Flora doesn’t really love Ralph.
  • Poirot has uncovered that the butler had blackmailed his previous employer. When confronted, the butler admits he was curious about Ackroyd’s overheard mention of blackmail, hoping he could get in on it. The fact that he evidently believes that it was Ackroyd himself, not Mrs. Farrars, being blackmailed is enough to convince Poirot that he was not the blackmailer in this case.
  • Her lawyer reveals that Mrs. Farrars had been making secretive payments totaling a large sum following her husband’s death; these must be the blackmail payments. Who the payments were to remains unclear.
  • Caroline insists to Poirot that Ralph was not the killer; she thinks Flora might be.
  • The mysterious stranger is found: Charles Kent, who had left Fernly by the time of the murder. The police hold him, but have nothing to charge him with.
  • Poirot begins to doubt Flora’s testimony that she had told her uncle goodnight at a quarter-to-ten. He develops an idea that she may have stolen the missing £40, and pretended to have been leaving the study when the butler caught her by the stairs. When confronted, Flora admits to the theft, opening the possibility that the murder happened earlier than was thought.
  • Maj. Blunt tries to clear Flora, unsuccessfully. Poirot deduces that Blunt and Flora love one another.

GUESS: The killer is Dr. James Shepard

I’ve suspected for a while that the doctor might be the killer, for the following reasons.

• He seems to do little to work out who the killer is in his own thoughts, almost as if he already knows because it was him.
• Poirot seems to be investigating him behind his back moreso than the other suspects, who he interrogates directly.
• The doctor pushed against bringing in Poirot, then has stuck close to him once he was involved.
• From an outside perspective: this book is considered exceptionally good out of Christie’s extensive bibliography. A murder mystery wherein the narrator did it would stand out to mystery fans and would be quite impressive if pulled off well. Also, Shepard was a new character, not the usual narrator for Poirot books, Hastings.

There was one big thing pointing away from the doctor killing Ackroyd: he had left the house well before the murder. Now that Flora’s good-night visit is shown to be a lie, Dr. Shepard was the last person to see Ackroyd alive. I confirmed this by going back to Chapter 4. I there read how Shepard left Ackroyd in his study after an argument; the way the passage was written, with a vague reference to “wondering if there was anything [he] had left undone”, which struck me as something that might reference killing Ackroyd without actually admitting to doing so. After revisiting this passage, I’m confident that Shepard is the killer. That’s my official guess.

• 20-22
• • Ursula and Ralph had been married, secretly. They had met the night of the murder in the outbuilding, and had argued over Ursula having told Ackroyd this secret earlier. Ralph left afterward, Ursula doesn’t know where.
  • Charles Kent is the housekeeper’s son, born out-of-wedlock in Kent but having spent much time in Canada. He is a drug addict. He and his mother met in the outbuilding just before Ursula and Ralph did.
• 23-27
• • The doctor had been taking notes on the case, which he shares with Poirot. Poirot says they will be useful in discerning the truth, which he will present to the gathered suspects.
  • The doctor had encountered Ralph after the murder and helped hide him by falsely sending him to a mental asylum. Poirot had found Ralph there and had him released, assuring him that he knew Ralph was innocent.
  • I was correct in my guess about the Doctor being the killer. I did not guess all of what he’d done; the Dictaphone salesman, the chair, and the boots did not enter my mind as relevant.