Who Killed Roger Ackroyd Essay

Written in 1926, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is Agatha Christie’s top selling novel due to its surprising and controversial ending. Like most of Christie’s novels, it was quite difficult for the majority of readers to detect who the murderer was, and most readers were perplexed to discover that it was the narrator, Dr. Sheppard. While some readers were pleasantly surprised by this plot twist, many disagreed with Christie’s choice to frame Dr. Sheppard as Roger Ackroyd’s murderer. Pierre Bayard, a French author, literature professor, and psychologist, is one such disappointed critic of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Bayard was so bothered by this that he wrote the book, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd, to prove why Dr. Sheppard was not the murderer.
Sheppard was not the killer. In the chapter “Improbabilities,” he sections his argument into three categories: the hours before the murder, the murder itself, and the period after the murder (59). In the hours before the murder, which is his strongest argument, focuses on Dr. Sheppard’s schedule. From the moment he discovers Mrs. Ferrars death to the time he killed Mr. Ackroyd, there would have been very little time for Sheppard to have prepared everything needed to commit the murder. His day goes as follows: examine Mrs. Ferrars, breakfast with Caroline, medical visits and patients, lunch with Caroline, gardening, meet Poirot, house calls, and a visit with Ralph Paton at Three Boars Inn, all of which, according to Bayard’s calculations, would take until about 5:00 P.M. (61). Then he arrives at Fernly Park to visit Roger Ackroyd at 7:30 where he commits the murder at about 8:45 P.M. (Christie, 43) In the span of two hours, Sheppard would not have been able to invent and transform the dictaphone into an alarm clock device from scratch (61). It’s also rather convenient that Sheppard happened to have all the necessary parts already in his possession in order to build this new device. However, not only must he invent this machine in two hours, Sheppard also had to stop at Three Boars Inn in order to steal a pair of Paton’s shoes (who somehow didn’t catch that they were missing) (62). With these two facts
While reading reviews of Pierre Bayard’s analysis of this book, we can see that many readers found his argument to be sound, eye-opening, and nearly irrefutable. Bayard paid attention to the finer details of the novel in order to provide the reader with a solid argument. Sheppard’s schedule was not well planned in order for him to create such a device and many aspects that were plausible, were not as well thought out (imitating Paton’s walk to provide a proper imprint of his shoe in that one area of mud). Of the characters, Caroline Sheppard made for a good fit as a murder suspect as she still falls in lines with Van Dine’s rules and, with some minor tweaking, the narration provided by Dr. Sheppard. Agatha Christie’s novel was still enjoyable to read and attempt to solve, but, either the ending or some of her clues and character development could use some work in order to be more