Dr. Sheppard (James Sheppard): The doctor who knew what every neighbor had died of

Mrs. Ferrars died on the night of September 16 to 17, a Thursday. That is how The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Agatha Christie, 1926) begins, in the voice of Dr. James Sheppard, the doctor of King’s Abbot. He was sent for at eight in the morning and there was nothing to be done: she had been dead for hours. Just after nine he gets home and lingers in the hall, taking longer than he needs to hang up his coat. He admits he is upset, and that the reason for the delay is his sister Caroline, who can spread anything he tells her all over the village within an hour and a half. For a year Caroline has been saying that Mrs. Ferrars poisoned her husband. He always replies that Mr. Ferrars died of acute gastritis made worse by drink, though he grants that the symptoms of gastritis and of arsenic are not unlike. At the table, with the bacon gone rather cold, he sums up the visit: a bad business, she must have died in her sleep. Warning: this case file gives away the ending of the novel.

// The theoryThe crime committed with a good reputation

In December 1939, in Philadelphia, Edwin H. Sutherland devoted his presidential address to the American Sociological Society to offenders no one studied. He published it in 1940 as “White-Collar Criminality” and developed it in White Collar Crime (1949). He called white-collar crime the offense committed by a respectable, high-status person in the course of his occupation, and among his examples he named medicine: illegal sale of narcotics, unnecessary treatment, fake specialists. His argument targeted the theories that blamed crime on poverty: they had been built on arrestees and prisoners, and the respectable man’s offense almost never ended in prison. In 1990, Susan Shapiro proposed sharpening the concept by defining it by the offense rather than by the offender’s class. What these cases share, she wrote, is the abuse of trust: the agent to whom others entrust their money, their health or their information uses that position to deceive, to take, or to keep quiet about what he ought to disclose.

// The subjectThe neighbor over the garden wall

In chapter III, a newly arrived neighbor who grows vegetable marrows, and whom Sheppard takes for a retired hairdresser, hurls one over the wall and very nearly hits him. He is Hercule Poirot, retired to the village. Once the fright has passed, Sheppard tells him that a year ago he came into a legacy he meant to travel on, but that he was greedy and risked it on a gold mine in Western Australia. In chapter IV he dines at Fernly Park, and in his study Roger Ackroyd confides that Mrs. Ferrars confessed to him that she poisoned her husband, and that someone had been blackmailing her ever since for huge sums. She did not give him the name. At twenty to nine a letter from the dead woman arrives. Sheppard urges him to read it, Ackroyd refuses, and at ten to nine the doctor leaves the study with the letter unopened, after hesitating a moment at the door. At a quarter past ten, back home, he gets a phone call: Ackroyd has been found murdered (chapter V).

(Spoiler warning.) In chapter XXVI, Poirot shows him how he worked it out. The walk from the house to the lodge gates takes five minutes, and Sheppard took ten. The doctor killed Ackroyd before leaving, left prints with the shoes of Ralph Paton, the stepson, and set a dictaphone so that the dead man’s voice would be heard at half past nine. The phone call was real: it was made from the station by one of his patients, a steward on an ocean liner, whom he had asked to run an errand. That gave him an excuse to come back and slip the machine into his bag. The blackmailer of Mrs. Ferrars was Sheppard himself: who knew better what killed Mr. Ferrars than the doctor attending him? The “legacy” was the widow’s twenty thousand pounds. He lost most of it speculating, pressed too hard, and she killed herself with an overdose of veronal. If Ackroyd read the letter, he was finished. Poirot does not turn him in that night: for his sister’s sake, he gives him until morning and suggests another way out. Chapter XXVII, “Apologia,” is the manuscript Sheppard finishes at five in the morning, proud of his exact and misleading sentences.

// The crackThe white collar that ends in a dagger

The theory explains well how Sheppard begins and less well how he ends. The blackmail is a textbook abuse of trust, the kind of offense Shapiro describes: information obtained in the course of a profession, turned into money. The murder is not. A stabbing in a study is the most classic crime there is, and the white collar only explains why Sheppard had so much to lose. Poirot sums it up in chapter XVII without naming him: an ordinary man, honored and respected, stumbles on someone else’s secret, finds that silence pays, and greed carries him further and further. That is neither a pathology nor a fate. It is a chain of decisions, and each one could have gone another way.

Nor does Sheppard spare himself the excuses. In his “Apologia” he writes that he takes no responsibility for Mrs. Ferrars’s death, which he calls the direct consequence of her own actions, and that he feels no pity for her: the denial of responsibility and the denial of the victim that Sykes and Matza described in 1957. Explaining Sheppard is not excusing him. And the ending confirms Sutherland in the most uncomfortable way: the respectable doctor’s case never reaches a court. A detective and an inspector settle it in private to spare a sister the scandal. Some even dispute the verdict: Pierre Bayard, in Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? (1998), argues that Poirot got it wrong. After all, everything we know is told to us by a narrator who has already fooled us once.