If you liked… The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie
The fourth of our series, wherein we showcase an all-time classic crime novel, and suggest some titles from the Bookdagger publishers that hit the same spot. This month, it’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie, first published in 1926 and some of the pastiches it inspired.
Roger Ackroyd was a man who knew too much.
He knew the woman he loved had poisoned her first husband. He knew someone was blackmailing her – and now he knew she had taken her own life with a drug overdose. The one thing he didn’t know was the identity of the mystery blackmailer…
But the evening post brought Roger this last scrap of information. But before he’d finished reading the letter, Roger was dead – stabbed through the neck where he sat in his study…
Poirot is called to upon to investigate the murder of Roger Ackroyd, a man with an intriguing story. He’d been courting Mrs Ferrars, a wealthy widow, who had recently died of a suspected suicide by overdose. To solve the murder of Roger Ackroyd, Poirot realises he must delve deeper into the circumstances surrounding Mrs Ferrars’ demise.
The New York Times said of this book, “There are doubtless many detective stories more exciting and blood curdling than The Murder of Roger Ackroyd but this reviewer has recently read very few which provide greater analytical stimulation.”
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, by Gilbert Adair
Boxing Day circa 1935. A snowed-in manor on the very edge of Dartmoor. A Christmas house-party. And overhead, in the attic, the dead body of Raymond Gentry, gossip columnist and blackmailer, shot through the heart. But the attic door is locked from the inside, its sole window is traversed by thick iron bars and, naturally, there is no sign of a murderer or a murder weapon.
Fortunately (though, for the murderer, unfortunately), one of the guests is the formidable Evadne Mount, the bestselling author of countless classic whodunits. In fact, were she not its presiding sleuth, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd is exactly the type of whodunit she herself might have written . . .
A Mysterious Affair of Style, by Gilbert Adair
London 1946. A decade may have passed since she solved the ffolkes Manor murder case narrated in The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, but Evadne Mount, herself the irrepressible author of countless bestselling whodunits, has aged as little as most fictional sleuths tend to do. And here she is again, in A Mysterious Affair of Style, seconded as ever by her loyal, long-suffering partner-in-detection, Chief-Inspector Trubshawe, formerly of Scotland Yard, on the trail of an even more fiendishly ingenious killer.
An actress is poisoned, not just on camera but in full view of a crowded film set. Only five people had an opportunity to administer the poison – yet not one of them had a conceivable motive. As Evadne Mount discovers, however, when she applies her not-so-little grey cells to the crime, each of them is implicated in a web of deceit whose lethal ramifications extend far beyond the confines of the studio in which the murder was committed.
For those readers who are already familiar with Gilbert Adair’s The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, this hugely entertaining new homage to the Golden Age of English murder mysteries and its most celebrated practitioner will, as they say, need no introduction. For those who are not, welcome to the world of Evadne Mount.
And Then There Was No One, by Gilbert Adair
Gustav Slavorigin, Booker Prize-winning novelist and notorious controversialist, is murdered in the picturesque Swiss town of Meiringen during its annual Sherlock Holmes Festival.
Since the price of a hundred million dollars has been placed on his head by an ultra-reactionary Texan billionaire, none of the festival’s guests can be regarded as above suspicion – save perhaps Evadne Mount, the formidable amateur sleuth who featured prominently in Gilbert Adair’s The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and A Mysterious Affair of Style. Yet neither of those two cases prepared her for the jaw-dropping twists and turns of this new investigation, climaxing, appropriately enough, at Meiringen’s principal tourist attraction, the Reichenbach Falls.
As the reader gradually discovers, however, And Then There Was No One is much more than the third panel of a triptych of detective stories. It’s a novel like no other, a hall of mirrors, a hole-in-one, a tour de force of stylistic brio and narrative ingenuity, a conjuring act that ends with the conjuror, or author, actually sawing himself in half.
