Known forits startling reveal, this is the book that changed Agatha Christie’s career. 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. Soon the evening post would let him know who the mystery blackmailer was. But Ackroyd was dead before he’d finished reading it – stabbed through the neck where he sat in the study. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was Agatha Christie’s first book to be published by William Collins in the spring of 1926. William Collins became part of HarperCollins and are still Christie’s publishers today. In her autobiography, Christie explains that the basic idea for this story was given to her by her brother-in-law, James, who once said ‘almost everybody turns out to be a criminal nowadays in detective stories – even the detective. What I would like to see is a Watson who turned out to be a criminal.’ Lord Louis Mountbatten later wrote to Christie with a similar idea before she begun constructing the novel.