Simon Kernick's five best thrillers

British thriller writer Simon Kernick talked to Daisy Banks of FiveBooks about five favorite thrillers, including:

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

Your next choice is by one of the queens of this genre, although perhaps she is more about crime than thrillers... This is Agatha Christie’s Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

I think this is a thriller, like all of her books, because plot is king in them and characterisation takes more of a back seat. This is probably the most famous of all her books, and certainly, for me, the cleverest. It was written in 1926 and it’s original because the twist at the end is stunning. How much can I give away with something like this?

Well, it is so well known that most people will already know the twist, and those who don’t can skip this paragraph [SPOILER ALERT]!

All right. Well, the narrator is a village doctor who acts as Hercule Poirot’s assistant throughout the book because Hastings is away in Argentina. All the way through, the doctor’s working hard alongside Hercule Poirot to solve the murder and it turns out right at the very end that he is the murderer. And it’s brilliant because it catches you out completely. People have tried the same formula – that of the so-called unreliable narrator – many times since, but Agatha Christie was the first to use this technique. And if you read the novel again, you can see how beautifully she sets it up. There’s nothing forced in the writing and there are no devices set up to mislead you. To have that original idea is just genius, and she was a genius.

Read about another book on Kernick's list.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is one of Lisa Scottoline's top ten books about justice and appears on John Curran's top ten list of Agatha Christie mysteries and John Mullan's list of ten of the best women writing as men.

--Marshal Zeringue