The Cook and Book Club is a small Australian based book club combining their love for reading and cooking. Declan, a member of the club, will be recapping his experience each month right here on The Nerd Daily!
BOOK | One person selects a book for everyone to read over the next month
COOK | The book selector hosts a dinner party with a themed meal related to the book
Coming into the New Year with a new name for our book club (changed simply due to the fact we weren’t reviewing movies as much as we thought we would), we were ready to tackle the classic murder mystery genre. In particular, we delved deeply into Agatha Christie’s iconic novel ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’, featuring the equally iconic fictional detective, Hercule Poirot. But first, Scott was serving up the themed dinner for the night.
Dinner
Possibly due to a lapse in memory of our last meeting of 2017, Scott provided the same meal that we discussed Orwell’s essays over—the traditional English meal of bangers, mash and onion gravy. Nevertheless, it was still a delicious accompaniment to our discussion of Agatha Christie’s detective novel. If you’ve read this far but don’t want major spoilers for ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’, turn back now. Because, as is the case with all murder mysteries, the fun lies in the final reveal, and so naturally this is what we wanted to get to talking about straight away.
In the final pages of the novel, Doctor Sheppard, our first person narrator, is revealed to be not so reliable after all. After a long-winded series of events full of red herrings, Poirot exposes the doctor as being the true killer of Roger Ackroyd. The reveal is a huge twist, turning everything we thought we knew about the course of events on its head. But of course, the clues were there from the beginning—the small gaps in Sheppard’s story, the scarce details of his own personal life, and eventually the dawning realisation that he could have been the only character to have feasibly pulled it off.
Alec and I weren’t completely caught off guard by the reveal though. Knowing that Agatha Christie’s most famous mysteries often have twist endings, I assumed that this wouldn’t be too different. However, it is important to note that given the novel was published early on in Christie’s writing career in the 1920’s, this twist would have once been considered completely unexpected. Since then, the unreliable narrator trope has taken off in mainstream film and literature.
Scott and Cassie took a more passive approach to the novel, experiencing the story as it unfolded rather than choosing to theorise potential endings. Even though the reveal was a much bigger surprise for them, I found that actively searching for the solution did not detract from the experience of the story. If anything, it felt more like we were a part of the case, working alongside Poirot to determine Roger Ackroyd’s murderer.
As a group of Sherlock fans, we made a point of comparing how Agatha Christie’s detective fiction holds up to that of her predecessor, Arthur Conan Doyle. Where Christie’s mysteries often revolve around an intricate web of relationships between standalone characters, Conan Doyle largely focuses on developing the idiosyncrasies and personal lives of Sherlock and Watson.
Poirot is also a much less abrasive and more charming detective than Holmes, and so his final deductions are presented in much more low-key fashions. This is clear in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd whereby the reveal comes in the form of a one-on-one conversation, Poirot gently urging the Doctor Sheppard to give himself up quietly. Compare this to Conan Doyle’s action-packed resolutions which play out more like dramatic confrontations, and it is clear how Agatha Christie carved out her own style within the mystery genre.
Dessert??
We were so caught in our discussion that it wasn’t until after we left that Scott realised he had forgotten to serve the French cheesecake, representing Poirot’s own appreciation of fine European food. But that’s okay—the night’s discussion had been particularly interesting. The murder mystery genre is one that I had wanted to look more closely at for a long time.
Although Poirot is the leading male character in many of her novels, Christie isn’t restricted by the patriarchal attitudes of her era. The dichotomy of relentless logic and empathy is broken down in Poirot’s creation, demonstrating that intelligent male characters do not necessarily need to be slaves to their own ego. Christie also takes this a step further, developing her secondary characters into more than just subjects for the male detective to show off to. Consequently, Agatha Christie’s legacy has lasted for good reason, with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd setting a standard for mystery fiction that writers today often try to emulate.
