In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

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In Agatha Christie's novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Dr. James
Sheppard not only commits the central crime, serves as first-person
narrator, and plays the genre-specific role of admiring companion and
assistant to the detective, Hercule Poirot; as a physician, he also is
officially in charge of his victim's health. A truly sophisticated criminal,
Sheppard profits from this relationship in order to build an alibi. Following
a dinner at Ackroyd's home, he stabs his patient and returns to
his own house, which he shares with his sister Caroline. There he receives
a phone call and tells Caroline that Ackroyd's butler is on the line:
"Parker telephoning ... They've just found Roger Ackroyd murdered"
(49). At this point, however (as will later become clear), Ackroyd's
servants have not yet found their master's corpse. The telephone call thus
gives the murderer a strategic advantage: he can be the first to arrive at
the scene of the crime. So important is this detail in his master plan that
when the detective at last confronts him with the carefully reconstructed
facts, Sheppard speaks of it, with pretended irony, as his ultimate defensive
position: '''And the telephone call?' I asked, trying to rally. 'You have
a plausible explanation for that also, I suppose?'" (306). Not without a
certain degree of professional appreciation for the complexity of Sheppard's
plot [see Murder]-and with even greater pride in his own intellectual
achievement in unraveling it-Poirot indeed comes up with an
answer:
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