BOOK REVIEW: AGATHA CHRISTIE'S "AND THEN THERE WERE NONE"

From an early age I knew very strongly the lust to kill...

Agatha Christie's AND THEN THERE WERE NONE is often listed as mystery or mystery-suspense. Actually I'd call it and out-and-out horror novel. Why? Because horror is "the anticipation of a terrifying outcome" and that's precisely what this book aims to be.

The plot is fiendishly simple. Eight people are invited to remote Soldier Island for a party. Waiting for them are a maid and butler, who inform the guests that their mysterious hosts will be arriving shortly. In the mean time, each person is handed a copy of the infamously gruesome little poem "Ten Little Indians.*" While waiting, one of the guests plays a gramophone, but instead of music the recorded voice announces that each member of the party -- including the maid and butler -- have committed, and gotten away with, some terrible crime, and that punishment is now at hand. The guests believe it's all just some macabre practical joke...until the first one of them dies. And when they realize that there is no way to communicate with the mainland, no way off the island until the scheduled boat arrives days later...panic begins to set in...and paranoia. Are they trapped on the island with a murderer hiding in the shadows...or is the murderer hiding in plain sight among them? Either way, the bodies are piling up fast, and for the dwindling number of survivors, the "anticipation of a terrifying outcome" grows both more unbearable and more certain with each passing moment. There is, it seems, no way to outrun your sins on Soldier Island...

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE is a startlingly good book. Christie uses clever writing technique to introduce a very large cast of characters quickly, and also establish just the vaguest trace of menace from the very first pages; also to create numerous "red herrings" and to misdirect the reader at every possible turn as to the killer's identity. Despite a shortish length and a lightning pace, the characters -- Lawrence Wargrave, Vera Claythorne, Philip Lombard, General John Macarthur, Emily Brent, Anthony Marston, Dr Edward Armstrong and William Blore, and the maid-butler combo Thomas and Ethel Rogers -- are finely drawn and, in some cases, decidedly sympathetic because they actually regret their sins, which of course only makes the horror-suspense element of the novel all the more effective. The killer partially agrees, arranging the earliest deaths for those who are the least villainous, and the final ones for those who deserve to suffer agonies of suspense as they wait minute by minute for their own end to come.

This novel has quite a lot to say about human beings, none of which is good, but it manages to avoid the depressing cynicism of, say, a Stanley Kubrick film. The murderer is driven by a wonderfully conflicting motive: said individual has the above-quoted "lust for murder" found in serial killers, but is also consumed by a need for justice, making this baddie a Detxer-like figure decades before anyone envisioned Dexter: he wants to kill, but his killings must serve a higher purpose. As for the victims, they vary in the degree of sympathy they will evoke, but this is par for the course in any horror story -- and at the risk of repeating myself, this is a horror story before it is anything else. Christie begins with mild foreboding, proceeds to unease, and then swiftly turns the knob until the characters are boiling in a terror of their own manufacture. And it is precisely because they are all guilty of something, but not necessarily evil or even "bad" in their daily lives, that the terror is so effective. Judgment is a fearful thing, especially when wielded by someone with a sense of righteousness and very little mercy.

No book is perfect, and the main flaw here is the last part of the novel, which consists of a large set-up to letting the killer explain their motives. The set-up is quite unnecessary and overly expositive and a single sentence introducing the actual confession, such as "The following was recovered in a bottle which washed up on a beach in East Anglia" would have sufficed. I feel Christie went a bit too far "behind the curtain" here, but the flaw is relatively minor.

AND THEN THERE WERE NONE was my first Agatha Christie book, but it won't be my last. Minor flaws aside, it's a terrific little novel that not only needs to be read, it needs to be read twice.

Note: When the book was originally published, the poem was actually called "Ten Little N*****s"...as was the book. Then it became TEN LITTLE INDIANS. When that too became politically unacceptable, the name was changed once more to AND THEN THERE WERE NONE. Hopefully this is the last change...but you never know.)