Summary: And Then There Were None

The GIST

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie is the mystery that other mysteries are measured against. Published in 1939, at the height of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, it takes ten people, puts them on a rock in the sea, and then starts subtracting. There is no Hercule Poirot, no Miss Marple, no brilliant sleuth of any kind to make sense of what is happening. There is only a house, a storm, a children's rhyme, and a shrinking circle of frightened people who slowly understand that the killer is sitting at the table with them.

Christie wrote it as a dare to herself. In her author's note she says she wanted a story that was "clear, straightforward, baffling, and yet had a perfectly reasonable explanation," one in which ten people could die without the whole thing turning silly or the culprit becoming obvious. She later said it was the hardest of all her novels to write, and in her autobiography she admitted she was pleased with what she had made of it. Readers have agreed for generations: it remains one of the best-selling books of all time, and the template for every locked-house, cut-off-from-the-world thriller that came after it.

The Story

It begins with invitations. Across England, eight people who have never met each receive a letter drawing them to Soldier Island, a lonely lump of rock off the coast of Devon long rumoured to be a playground of the rich and famous. Each letter is tailored to its reader: an offer of work, a summer holiday, the promise of seeing old friends. Each is signed by a Mr. or Mrs. Owen.

The guests could hardly be more different. Justice Wargrave is a retired judge, dry and watchful. Vera Claythorne is a young woman who has worked as a governess. Philip Lombard is a soldier of fortune with an easy smile and a revolver in his luggage. Emily Brent is an elderly, rigidly religious spinster. General Macarthur is an old veteran of the First World War. Dr. Armstrong is a prosperous physician. Anthony Marston is a handsome, careless young man who treats life as a party. And William Blore is a former police detective who arrives pretending to be someone else.

A boat carries them across. Waiting at the house are Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, a butler and housekeeper, a married couple who were hired only recently and have never laid eyes on their employers either. The Owens, they explain, have been delayed and will come tomorrow. So there are ten people on the island, and no host.

Small oddities pile up. In every bedroom hangs a framed copy of the same nursery rhyme, the one that begins "Ten little soldier boys went out to dine" and counts its soldiers down through a series of grisly accidents until none are left. On the dining room table stands a set of ten little soldier figurines.

Then, after a fine dinner on the first evening, a voice fills the room. It comes from a gramophone record, and it reads out a charge sheet. One by one, all ten people in the house, servants included, are named and accused of causing a death.

The charges are specific. Marston ran down two children with his car. The Rogerses let a former employer die through neglect so that they could inherit. General Macarthur sent his wife's lover to certain death during the war. Emily Brent is blamed for the suicide of a former maid, who drowned herself. Dr. Armstrong operated on a patient while drunk. Blore gave false evidence against an innocent man to win a promotion. Lombard abandoned twenty-one African men to die in the bush so that he and a companion could live. Vera let a small boy in her care swim out into dangerous water, hoping the man she loved would inherit in his place. Even the judge is charged: Wargrave is said to have steered a jury into hanging a man. These are killings the law never touched, either because nothing could be proved or because no law had technically been broken.

The reactions tell their own stories. Some are outraged. Some offer smooth explanations or pretend not to understand. Lombard cheerfully admits the whole thing. Miss Brent refuses to accept that any blame could attach to her, and when the deaths begin she is inclined to see the hand of divine judgment at work. Comparing their letters, the guests realize the invitations were all fakes, and the judge points out the joke hidden in the host's name: U. N. Owen, or, said aloud, unknown. Everyone agrees they should leave at once. But the boat will not come back until morning.

Before the evening is over, one of them lifts a glass, drinks, chokes, and falls dead. The doctor finds cyanide in the drink. It looks like suicide, though nothing about the victim suggested a wish to die. By morning there has been a second death, and someone notices that the figurines on the table are no longer ten. Each death, they see with growing horror, matches a verse of the rhyme hanging on their walls.

The survivors decide their unseen host must be hiding somewhere on the island, and they search it thoroughly. They find no one. That leaves only one conclusion, and it is the judge who puts it into words: "Mr. Owen is one of us…"

From here the book tightens like a wire. The weather turns, a storm seals the island off from the mainland, and no boat can reach them. The guests lock away the medicines and anything that could serve as a weapon. They search each other's rooms. They watch one another's hands. Alliances form and dissolve in an afternoon. The revolver goes missing. And as fear strips away their manners, the old crimes rise to the surface: Vera in particular finds herself pulled back, again and again, to a little boy in the water.

Still the rhyme keeps counting, and still the little soldiers keep disappearing from the table. Who is doing it, how, and whether anyone gets off the island alive is something Christie holds back until the very last pages, and it deserves to be discovered there.

What It's Really About

On the surface this is a puzzle, and a fiendish one. Christie tells it through an all-seeing narrator who drops into one mind after another, so that we overhear nearly everyone's private thoughts, including, at moments, the murderer's, without ever being able to tell which thoughts those are. Every door of possibility seems to close, and then she points to a window. Because there is no detective, the reader has to be the detective, and most readers lose.

Christie is deliberately breaking the rules of her own genre here. The classic mystery has a brilliant sleuth who gathers the suspects and explains everything. This one has only Blore, the ex-policeman, whose theories are reliably wrong. The classic mystery asks who killed one person; this one asks who is killing everyone, and offers no hero at all, only a group of victims who are also, each of them, culprits. One writer on story structure points out that the character whose decisions actually drive the plot is the murderer, who stays invisible in plain sight for the entire book. Readers divide on whether the puzzle is fair. One reviewer felt she was a step ahead of the characters throughout; another thought the solution all but impossible to reach from the clues given, and noticed a moment where the survivors fail to check something they really should have. Nearly everyone agrees the explanation, when it comes, is ingenious.

Underneath the puzzle is a darker subject: guilt and justice. None of the ten is innocent. Each has caused a death and walked away, and each has spent years building a story that makes it bearable. The island takes those stories apart. What do we owe for a wrong no court can punish? Who has the right to collect? And is a person who appoints himself judge and executioner serving justice, or just feeding an appetite?

It is also, quite simply, frightening. Readers often note that it plays less like a cosy whodunit than like psychological horror, an ancestor of the slasher film, where the terror comes from the certainty that the killer is in the room, acting just as scared as everyone else.

The story's afterlife is remarkable too. Christie turned down a request from another writer to dramatize the novel because she wanted the challenge herself, and her stage version opened in London's West End in 1943, running even after its theatre was bombed, before a long Broadway run. She called it her best piece of craftsmanship as a playwright. After the war, a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp told her that prisoners there had staged their own version of the story and that it had sustained them.

One piece of history is worth knowing. The novel first appeared in Britain under a title containing a racial slur, taken from the rhyme it was built on; American editions used the present title, and for a time it was also sold as Ten Little Indians. Modern editions use soldiers throughout. Some attitudes voiced by the characters still reflect the 1930s.

Who Should Read It

Anyone who loves a mystery should read this one, and it is a perfect first Christie because it stands entirely alone. It suits readers who enjoy closed-circle thrillers, fans of the board game Clue, and anyone curious about where the trapped-guests-picked-off-one-by-one story comes from. The prose is lean and the pace never slackens. Come for the puzzle; stay for the chill of realizing that every one of these people has something to answer for.