And Then There Were None Summary: Agatha Christie's Island of Ten Strangers
What it is about
Agatha Christie published And Then There Were None in 1939. Eight people accept invitations to a small island off the coast of Devon. None of them knows their hosts, a Mr and Mrs U. N. Owen, who have not yet arrived. They are met instead by the butler and housekeeper, Thomas and Ethel Rogers. That makes ten people on the island, with no way off.
In every bedroom hangs a framed copy of an old rhyme. On the dining room table stand ten figurines. Acting on written instructions he has been left, Mr Rogers plays a gramophone record. The voice on it accuses every person present, servants included, of causing a death and escaping punishment. Before the evening is over, one of the guests is dead from cyanide.
From there the book becomes a closed circle at its purest. The island is searched and nobody else is found. The deaths continue, each one matching a line of the rhyme, and after each one a figurine disappears from the table. The survivors are forced to accept the obvious conclusion. The killer is one of them, sitting at the same table, sleeping behind one of the same doors.
Christie called this the most difficult of her novels to write, because of the complexity of the plot and the solution. She also thought it the best piece of craftsmanship she had produced. Readers have agreed at scale. It is the world's best-selling mystery novel, with more than 100 million copies sold by 2007, and in 2015 a global vote run by the author's estate named it the World's Favourite Christie.
The main characters
There is no detective here. No Poirot, no Miss Marple, nobody with the authority to gather everyone in the drawing room and explain. That absence is the point. The ten are left to investigate themselves.
Vera Claythorne is a young woman hired as a secretary, and she carries the novel's emotional weight. Philip Lombard is a soldier of fortune who arrives armed, and whose missing gun becomes a problem for everyone. Mr Justice Wargrave is a recently retired judge who takes charge of the group, proposing that drugs and firearms be secured and that everyone submit to a search. Dr Armstrong is a physician who ends up certifying the deaths of his fellow guests. William Blore is a former policeman. Emily Brent is a rigid, pious spinster. General MacArthur is an old soldier. Anthony Marston is a careless young man with a fast car. The Rogers complete the ten.
What links them is the accusation on the record. Each has caused a death that the law could not touch. They are not innocents trapped by a maniac, and Christie never lets the reader forget it.
The themes
Justice is the engine. The book asks what happens when the courts cannot reach a guilty person, and then shows a form of punishment that is itself monstrous. The guests are both victims and offenders, which keeps sympathy unstable. You want them to survive while knowing what they have done.
Death arrives as a counting exercise. The rhyme and the ten figurines turn murder into arithmetic, and the dwindling numbers do more work than any chase scene could. Everyone on the island can read ahead and see roughly how they are meant to die.
Revenge runs underneath. Someone has gone to extraordinary trouble, buying an island through a sleazy agent named Isaac Morris and inventing the Owens, in order to hold a private trial with no appeal. The novel is as interested in the mind that would plan that as in the deaths themselves.
A note on the title
The novel first appeared in the UK in 1939 from Collins Crime Club under a different title, taken from an 1869 minstrel song that forms the central element of the plot. That title was used in Britain until 1985. The first American edition, in 1940, was published as And Then There Were None because the original was considered unacceptably racially loaded in the United States, and the book also circulated there as Ten Little Indians between 1964 and 1986. Later editions in both countries revised the text and the rhyme to remove the racial language. It is now published in English only as And Then There Were None.
The ending explained, spoilers ahead
Stop here if you want the solution kept.
After Anthony Marston, Mrs Rogers, General MacArthur, Mr Rogers and Emily Brent die, Wargrave is found shot in the forehead, dressed in what looks like a judge's wig and scarlet robes. Armstrong then disappears. Blore is crushed by a marble clock pushed from Vera's window. Vera and Lombard find Armstrong drowned on the beach, and Vera, believing herself the last survivor, takes Lombard's gun and shoots him. She returns to her room to find a noose and a chair waiting, and hangs herself.
Scotland Yard finds ten bodies and cannot solve it. The reconstruction from the victims' diaries rules out Armstrong, Lombard and Vera, and makes Blore's death unlikely to be suicide. The answer comes in a bottle recovered from the sea. Wargrave wrote a confession. He had both a strong sense of justice and a lust to kill, which is why he became a judge, and sentencing men to death eventually stopped being enough. He chose ten people who had caused deaths without facing trial, hired Morris to buy the island and then tricked him into a fatal overdose of barbiturates. He persuaded Armstrong to help stage his own death as a trick to flush out the killer, then killed Armstrong too. When the rest were dead, he shot himself in a way that matched the staged death the diaries recorded, leaving what he called ten dead bodies and an unsolved problem.
Why it still matters
The structure has been copied so often that it now reads as a genre in itself, but the original holds because the puzzle is fair and the pressure is real. Critics praised the ingenuity of the plot on first publication. In 1990 the Crime Writers' Association ranked it nineteenth on its list of the best crime novels, and in 1995 the Mystery Writers of America placed it tenth on a comparable list. It has been adapted for film, television, radio and theatre more often than anything else Christie wrote.
It suits readers who want a mystery that is tightly engineered rather than cosy, and who do not mind a book with no comforting detective and no rescue. If you are new to Christie, it is the one to start with.
