Roger Ackroyd

So I'm listening to the commentary on The Singing Detective and the mysterious men (I'm not going to spoil it) find a page that has written on it "Who killed Roger Ackroyd?"

The director just said, "this was a maddening little joke of Dennis's, 'Who Killed Roger Ackroyd' being a famous detective story by Marjory Allingham from the Thirties".

Dennis Potter (the writer) is dead, but I hope he knew better. Oh, he must have - all things considered, the way he's using it here... it's much more than a "little joke".

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is an enormously famous detective novel by Agatha Christie published in 1926. (I confess to looking up the publication date, but I knew it was the Twenties.) I won't tell you why it's so famous, because that would spoil the book, but it's a ground-breaking novel.