#49: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
I’ve always been a huge Christie fan—my mother and father, in the early days of their marriage, poor as churchmice, used to go on “dates” where they would get 25 cent ice cream cones from the World’s First McDonald’s in Des Plaines, IL (now a museum, with a working McDonald’s next door), then pick up cheap paperbacks at a used bookstore and finish up with $1 beers at a local bar (my father always bought sci-fi novels, my mother amassed a complete collection of Christie)—and plowed through most of my mother’s collection before we moved and they were packed up, never to emerge from our attic again; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is by far one of my favorites, because it is Christie’s cleverest by a mile (if you say Murder on the Orient Express I WILL HURT YOU) and rereading it just makes me realize how incredibly talented this prolific novelist really was, even if she was a bit off her rocker.
