Author: Agatha Christie · Published: 1939 · Genre: Mystery, Classic Crime
And Then There Were None is the most tightly engineered mystery Christie ever wrote. Ten strangers are lured to an island and killed one by one according to a nursery rhyme, with no detective to save them. It is short, bleak and still gripping more than eighty years on. Read it if you have ever enjoyed a whodunit, but be aware of the ugly history of its original title.
What it’s about Eight people accept invitations to Soldier Island, off the coast of Devon, from a host who signs himself U. N. Owen. Two servants, Thomas and Ethel Rogers, have been hired to look after them. The guests include a young games mistress, Vera Claythorne; a soldier of fortune, Philip Lombard; a retired judge; a Harley Street doctor; a pious elderly spinster; a retired general; a reckless rich young man; and a former police inspector. Their host never appears.
On the first evening, a gramophone record accuses each of them of causing a death and escaping justice. Then the guests begin to die, in the order and manner of the rhyme framed in every bedroom, while small figures vanish one by one from the dining table. The boat stops coming. After searching the island, the survivors realise the killer must be one of them.
What works – The engine. The rhyme gives the plot a countdown and gives readers a morbid game: which verse comes next, and how will it be fulfilled? Christie tightens the screw with each death. – Paranoia. With no detective, suspicion has to come from the characters themselves. Alliances shift, the group shrinks, and the psychology of guilt matters as much as the clues. Every survivor has a secret, and every secret is a motive to lie. – Economy. There are no wasted chapters. The storm, the isolation and the dread are built from very little, which is why the book still reads so fast. – Guilt as the real subject. None of the guests is simply a victim. Each is accused of a death the law could not punish, and Christie keeps asking what justice means in that gap. The book’s moral chill comes from that question as much as from the body count. – The solution. It is ingenious, and Christie plays fair: the pieces are on the page. Very few readers put them together.
The controversy The book was first published in Britain in 1939 under a title taken from a minstrel song that used a racial slur, and the island had the same name. The American edition of 1940 was retitled And Then There Were None, after the rhyme’s last line, and the island became Indian Island. For decades it was also sold as Ten Little Indians. British editions kept the original title until 1985. Modern editions use Soldier Island and a rhyme about soldier boys, and the French edition dropped its own equivalent title in 2020. Older copies still carry this language, and some period prejudice survives in the characters’ attitudes.
Other criticisms are more ordinary. The characters are types rather than people, sketched mainly through their guilty pasts, and few of them are memorable beyond Vera and Lombard. And because there is no detective, the explanation has to arrive by other means, which some readers find less satisfying than watching Poirot reason his way to the truth in a room full of suspects.
Who should read it Everyone who likes mysteries, and especially anyone who knows the story only from adaptations or parodies. It is the template for countless trapped-with-a-killer stories, from country-house thrillers to slasher films, and it is still better than almost all of them. Read a modern edition, and try to avoid spoilers online first.
Rating: 5/5
Image credits — Cover image via Open Library. Cover design © the publisher, shown for review purposes.
