1939
And Then There Were None
TT
The 1926 Poirot novel with the most argued-about twist in detective fiction — the book that made Agatha Christie famous and nearly got her thrown out of the Detection Club.
In the quiet village of King's Abbot, wealthy widow Mrs. Ferrars dies of an apparent overdose, and gossip whispers she was being blackmailed over her husband's death. The following evening, her fiancé Roger Ackroyd — the man she confided in — is found stabbed in his locked study.
The story is narrated by Dr. James Sheppard, the village physician, who becomes an assistant of sorts to his eccentric new neighbor: a retired Belgian detective named Hercule Poirot, who has given up crime-solving to grow vegetable marrows. Ackroyd's murder pulls Poirot back in, with Sheppard playing Watson and chronicling the case.
What follows is classic Golden Age construction — a house full of suspects, an inheritance, secret marriages, hidden debts, footprints on a windowsill — executed with Christie's usual sleight of hand. But it's the ending that made this novel immortal. When Poirot gathers the threads, the solution is so audacious that critics in 1926 accused Christie of cheating. She hadn't. Every clue is on the page.
Yes — it regularly tops polls of the greatest crime novels ever written, and in 2013 the Crime Writers' Association voted it the best crime novel of all time.
Honest caveats: the pacing is gentler than modern thrillers, with a lot of drawing-room interviews and village gossip between developments, and the middle can feel sedate if you're used to contemporary crime fiction. Some period attitudes date it. But the payoff justifies everything — this is a book whose ending genuinely changed the genre, and it plays scrupulously fair. Also good to know: although it's the fourth Poirot novel, Poirot books stand alone completely, so you can start here with zero background.
Yes — the definitive version is the feature-length episode of ITV's Agatha Christie's Poirot starring David Suchet, which aired in 2000 as part of the long-running series. It takes some liberties with the framing but keeps the famous solution. The novel was also adapted much earlier as the 1931 British film Alibi (based on the stage play of the same name), the first time Poirot appeared on screen. If you can, read the book first — no adaptation can replicate the trick the way Christie's prose does.
No. The Poirot novels are almost entirely self-contained — recurring characters aside, each case stands alone, and Christie herself didn't write them with continuity in mind. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the fourth Poirot book, but it's one of the most common (and best) places to start. If you want strict chronology, begin with The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), but it's genuinely optional.
Because of its ending. The solution broke an unwritten rule of detective fiction so boldly that some 1926 critics called it unfair — while others recognized it as a stroke of genius. The controversy made Christie a household name, and in 2013 the Crime Writers' Association voted it the best crime novel ever written.
Yes, arguably the best one. You need no prior knowledge — the book even reintroduces Poirot as a mysterious retired newcomer to the village. The only argument against starting here is that it sets an impossibly high bar for every mystery you read afterward.
There are 33 Poirot novels plus enough short stories to fill several collections — about 39 books in total — published between The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) and Curtain: Poirot's Last Case (1975). You can read them in almost any order; only Curtain should be saved for last.
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