A British translator has suggested that Agatha Christie borrowed the famous plot twist in her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd from a short story by a Norwegian author, the Guardian reports.
[SPOILER ALERT: This article contains a spoiler for Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which is 94 years old—but this is the Internet, and someone’s definitely going to get mad at us if we don’t include a warning, so here it is. Please do not drag us on Twitter.]
Lucy Moffatt, who lives in Norway, thinks the legendary British novelist might have been influenced by a story by Sven Elvestad (who wrote under the pen name Stein Riverton) that appeared in an English magazine two years before Roger Ackroyd was published.
In both Elvestad’s story and Christie’s novel, the murderer turns out to be—
[SPOILER ALERT: This is your last warning!]
—the narrator.
Christie credited both her brother-in-law and British statesman Louis Mountbatten with the idea of having the murderer narrate the book. But her great-grandson, James Prichard, said it was possible that the author was influenced by the story.
“It is possible she read it, as she read a lot, but it is also possible she didn’t,” he told the Guardian.
Moffatt’s publisher made clear that they’re not accusing Christie of plot theft. “We do not claim this is conclusive proof that Christie ‘borrowed’ the idea for Roger Ackroyd,” a spokesperson for Lightning Books said.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
