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While trying to retire, Poirot investigates the murder of a rich man in the country.
Original Air Date: November 12, 1939
Originating in New York
Starring: Orson Welles as Hercules Poirot and Dr. Sheppard; Edna May Oliver as Caroline Shepherd; Alan Napier; Brenda Forbes; Mary Taylor; George Colouris; Ray Collins; Everett Sloane
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Join us again tomorrow for another detective drama from the Golden Age of Radio.
The adaptation of Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” on “The Campbell’s Playhouse” has her famous sleuth, Hercule Poirot, identifying the murderer from, it would seem, “second sight”; for his adroit deductions of the novel have been swept aside! SPOILER ALERT! Christie had earlier used the idea of the first-person narrator as the murderer, but it took its employment in her “Ackroyd” novel to, as it were, kick up a storm. Being as the Poirot mysteries were more often than not rendered in the third person, a sudden switch to using a first-person narrator — at least in retrospect — could have seemed suspicious. Nothing is here made of the villain employing a Dictaphone for an alibi, as in the novel — and, as I recall — using his doctor’s bag to conceal it always struck me as fallacious, being as these were rather cumbersome, with a large horn, and could never have been so concealed. Incidentally, the RKO sleuth referenced by Edna May Oliver was “Hildegarde WITHERS”, not WINTERS! She starred in three of the six features, which were produced from 1932 to 1937.
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