Another Agatha Christie! Clearly I like a detective novel and given the stress of pandemic wedding planning and the ‘spooky’ month of October, another Agatha Christie just felt right. And Then There Were None is Christie’s 1939 book, previously published as Ten Little Indians and before that by another even more offensive title. The name of the book comes from children’s nursery rhyme that forms the basis for the multiple murders in the book.
Set on an island off the south coast of England, the book gathers together 10 seemingly random individuals, who are all invited to the island for a week of vacation or engaged to perform services on said island. Once they arrive they find they have all been lured to the island under false pretences and there is no host/employer to be found. On their first night, the newly hired butler plays a grammaphone recording as directed, and it contains accusations against each ‘guest’- namely that each of them has caused the death of another person in ways the law cannot punish them for. One guest and then another die and the remaining guests turn their suspicions on each other.
This is essentially a locked room mystery but on a whole island rather than a house/room. There is no detective- no Poirot or Marple makes an appearance- and so the reader is left to try and puzzle out the answer before any of the guests, who are doing the same. I definitely wasn’t able to get there before the final reveal, and it was a scary and increasingly tense ride. This was the second Christie novel I’ve read this year (since this summer in fact), and this was one of her better ones- devious characters, tricky plot and thoughtful motivations (the killer has a moral motive, but does that excuse the murders undertaken?).
My copy of this book had a lonely island landscape as its cover, so that’s my cbr13bingo Landscape square.