You've Gotta Love Christie - A Review of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Christie’s Portrayal of Social History during the Interwar Years

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Priestman (2013, p. 22-23) describes Christie's works as projecting a more exclusive community, whereby many characters are of the same or similar class of mainly social equals, traditional and illiberal. At first glance, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd can be considered to reflect only the comfort of a narrative separated from that of the broader population during the interwar years. To investigate this further, I will examine how valuable the novel is as a tool to inspect 1920s social history and cotemporal politics.

Christie identified with conservative values, and the country was governed by a Conservative Prime Minister when Ackroyd was published. Regardless, Nichol (2019) states that Christie attempted to project the current state of the country rather than advocate for her personal politics. This supports Snell’s assertion that,

“It is perhaps as a record of social change that [Christie’s] works will be the most valuable to the social historian” (2010, p. 23).

None the less, Snell (2010, p.23) also advises caution in accepting society as written in historical terms. Christie’s works are fictional, implying aspects may be enhanced or designed to fit the narrative, though he agrees that novelists project an essential view of their time.

Christie's village appears rather unconvincing historically with its country house style of narrative representation. During 1926, Britain was not filled with cosy communities in rural areas, worrying only about a murder or the gossip rife within an insular vicinity.

Historic Newspapers timeline of 1926 events (2021) indicates that martial law had been imposed in May by Stanley Baldwin in reaction to the General Strike of 1926. This created much conservative anxiety. Nottingham (1984 p. 3) affirms the British government believed there was a feasibility that revolutionary insurrection was possible. Hoaxes.org (2021) states that these events were preceded earlier in 1926 by widespread panic created throughout Britain by a radio play that asserted mobs were looting London and attacking buildings, such as the houses of parliament. This provides a compelling argument for Christie’s novel being purely that of comfort and distraction from uncertain times by drawing the focus away from cities filled with post-war devastation and possible subversion, to the gentler pace of village life in delimited, familiar domestic settings.

Snell opens with a quote from Murder at the Vicarage (1930), whereby Miss Marple states,

“Nothing, I believe, is so full of life under the microscope as a drop of water from a stagnant pool” (2010, p. 21).

This noteworthy analogy compares a myriad of life trapped within a drop of water to a view of a self-absorbed village. Outsiders are unable to enter without causing a metaphorical bubble to burst. In Ackroyd, during a conversation with Parker, regarding placement of the furniture in the room where the murder occurred, Poirot states, “It is completely unimportant, that is why it is so interesting” (p. 84), while discussing the simple movement of the chair in he recognises that any detail, however small, is important.

There is the feeling that Christie, projecting through Poirot, has an informed intelligence and focussed ability akin to a historian, enabling her to investigate all elements of the society she endeavours to portray. Using a drip-feeding technique, Christie can project a more rounded picture of an encapsulated society at that time. She provides a glimpse of her process within chapter 13 of the novel, where she writes, “Women observe subconsciously a thousand little details ... and they call the result intuition” (p. 137).

Mills and Bernthal (2019, p. 125) propose that in a Murder is Announced (1950), Christie utilizes a wartime Jewish refugees’ displacement to paint a perplexing and harrowing picture of dystopia within post-war Britain. Using such tropes in her later novels would indicate her ability to employ similar techniques within Ackroyd. Firstly, we find Poirot, our Belgian detective, the foreigner, entering the tight-knit circle of the village. In the wider world, Britannica (2021) states the Treaty of Versailles’s creates a no longer neutral Belgium during the interwar years. This suggests a detective, who might previously have been considered unbiased due to political affiliations, now could be regarded with more suspicion by the villagers because that was no longer the case.

Conversely, the narrative is mainly told from the doctor's perspective, a man in a position of trust. Shepherd records information in a manuscript, though we later discover this unreliable narration in his case. During these times of British anxiety, it is likely that information relayed to the general populace was felt to be unreliable, as per previous examples and especially by those in support of the general strike. According to Horsely,

“Christie creates plots that are symptomatic of instability. She focuses on disruption of family life from within…structures her narratives to reveal sources of menace that seem inextricably bound up with the traditional social hierarchies she represents” (2005, p.40).

Because of this, it seems that Christie is not simply trying to provide a distraction but rather provide a vision of a societal class set on self-sabotage. This would be a natural assumption at a time where, in wider Britain, the Labour Party had an extensive affinity with trades unions and would return to power within three years, therefore creating a threat to the middle and upper-class conservative ideals portrayed within Christie’s novels.

In Ackroyd, Christie's segregation from the wider world creates a plot device that assists Poirot. The gossip is only based on the current events in the village and not about what is occurring externally, providing essential information to aid the detective’s deductions and therefore provide a compelling narrative that can be considered a snapshot of 1920s society.

Bibliography

Christie, A., 1926. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company.

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2022. Belgium - Belgium and World War I [online]. Available from: https://www.britannica.com/place/Belgium/Belgium-and-World-War-I [Accessed 2 January 2022].

Historic Newspapers, 2021. Complete Timeline of 1926 Events - Historic Newspapers [online]. Available from: https://www.historic-newspapers.co.uk/blog/1926-history-timeline/ [Accessed 7 November 2021].

Horsley. L., 2005. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction [online]. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mills, R, & Bernthal, J.C., 2019. Agatha Christie Goes to War. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Museum of Hoaxes., 2021. The BBC Radio Panic [online]. Available from: http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_bbc_radio_panic [Accessed 7 November 2021].

Nicol, D., 2019. Bad Business: Capitalism and Criminality in Agatha Christie’s Novels, Entertainment and Sports Law Journal [online], 17(1), 6.

Nottingham, C.J., 1984. The State and Revolution in Britain 1916-1926 [online]. Available from: https://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/14836/1/386927.pdf [Accessed 7 November 2021].

Snell, K. D. M., 2010. A Drop of Water from a Stagnant Pool? Inter-War Detective Fiction and the Rural Community. Social History [online], vol. 35 (1) 21.