And Then There Were None
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For the video game, see And Then There Were None (video game).
- For the René Clair film, see And Then There Were None (film).
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| Cover of HarperCollins edition (2003) | |
| Author | Agatha Christie |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Mystery Detective |
| Publisher | Collins Crime Club |
| Released | 1939 |
| Media Type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-312-97947-9 (reissue) |
And Then There Were None (also known as Ten Little Indians and originally as Ten Little Niggers) is a detective novel by Agatha Christie first published in 1939.
Contents |
[edit] Plot introduction
The story focuses on ten strangers who are all brought, by misleading information, to an island off the coast of Devon, in southern England.
One by one they die, and gradually realise that the killer is amongst them. By the end, the story has become a locked room mystery, with all the characters dead and the police left with ten unsolved murders.
[edit] Characters
In order of death:
- Anthony James Marston, a young, reckless playboy. His three loves are fast cars, women and alcohol. An almost perfect specimen of a man born to a wealthy family, he's vain and self absorbed with little time for the lower orders of society who he may have harmed at one point in the past.
- Mrs. Ethel Rogers, the nervous housekeeper and cook. One of the first people to come to the island, she's respectable and efficient but looks like she's scared of something and is always looking over her shoulder. She may have a good reason.
- General John Gordon Macarthur, a retired World War I hero. He's now a lonely but still proud man who has lost contact with his old friends in the military and has, according to the rumors, more than a few skeletons in his closet.
- Mr. Thomas Rogers, the butler, Mrs. Rogers' husband. One of the first people to come to the island, he's respectable, efficient but with no imagination. Every inch the model English butler - but appearances may be deceptive.
- Emily Caroline Brent, an elderly spinster and a religious zealot. A woman of unyielding principles who uses the Bible to justify anything and her inability of showing compassion or understanding for others may have caused suffering in the past.
- Justice Lawrence Wargrave ("the Hanging Judge"), a retired judge famous for the many death sentences he pronounced in his career: he may have used the letter of the law to evade the spirit of the law on occasions.
- Dr. Edward Armstrong, a Harley Street surgeon. Worked his way up the social ladder but lately he has become tired with the long working hours with little reprieve. Has an extremely addictive personality which may have gotten him into trouble in the past.
- William Henry Blore, a retired police inspector, now a private investigator. A big, hulking and bullying man who solved a series of robberies during his police days but may not have been entirely honest about his methods.
- Philip Lombard, a soldier of fortune. Travelled most of the world and has a reputation of being a good man in a tight spot: he has apparently "sailed very near the wind" on occasion due to shady activities. Literally down to his last square meal, he comes to the island with a loaded revolver.
- Vera Elizabeth Claythorne, a young teacher and ex-governess. Forced to take mostly secretarial jobs since her last job as a governess dried up. The details of her break up with her fiancee are clouded in mystery.
[edit] Plot summary
As the novel opens, ten people journey toward a house on a fictitious place called Indian Island off the coast of Devon. Upon arriving, each person finds a slightly odd bit of bric-a-brac in his or her room: a framed copy of a nursery rhyme, Ten Little Indians (originally called Ten Little Niggers in the first published version), hanging on the wall. When the guests gather in the parlor after dinner the first night, a mysterious gramophone recording informs them that all ten of them have been found guilty of murder, although in each case the killings could not be dealt with by the law.
- Marston, ran over and killed two children named John & Lucy Coombes while driving recklessly, but due to his wealth and position in society, he was never properly prosecuted and simply had his licence withdrawn;
- Mr. and Mrs. Rogers let their invalid employer Jennifer Brady die of neglect;
- General Macarthur sent his wife's lover Lt. Arthur Richmond on a suicide mission during the war;
- Miss Brent's maid Beatrice Taylor committed suicide after being cruelly kicked out of the household when she became pregnant;
- Wargrave knowingly sentenced Edward Seton, an innocent defendant, to hang;
- Armstrong performed an operation while drunk and killed Louisa Mary Clees;
- Blore perjured himself in the trial of a bank robber named James Landor who later died in prison;
- Lombard abandoned a party of native retainers to die in the African bush;
- Vera Claythorne purposefully let a small boy in her care named Cyril Hamilton swim out to sea and drown, but was cleared by a coroner's inquest.
The characters realize they've all been tricked into coming to the island, but now have no way to get back to the mainland. Within moments, Anthony Marston dies from cyanide in his drink. Next morning, Mrs. Rogers never wakes up and is assumed to have received a fatal overdose of sleeping drugs. At lunchtime, General MacArthur is found dead from a blow to the back of his head.
In growing panic, the survivors search the island for the murderer or possible hiding places, but find nothing. They then realize that the murderer must be one of them, and is playing a sadistic game – killing them in a manner paralleling the nursery rhyme, and also removing one of ten little figurines in the dining room after each murder. The survivors have a meeting and discover that none of them has an alibi for any of the deaths.
The next morning Rogers is found dead in the woodshed, having been killed with a large axe. Later that day, Emily Brent dies from an injection of potassium cyanide-the injection mark on her neck is a parody of a bee sting. The five remaining — Dr. Armstrong, Justice Wargrave, Philip Lombard, Vera Claythorne, and Inspector Blore — become increasingly paranoid. Wargrave announces that anything on the island that could be used as a weapon should be locked up. They lock up Wargrave's sleeping pills and Armstrong's doctor equipment, but Lombard's revolver has gone missing. They spend the afternoon sitting around, watching each other.
Later that evening, Vera goes to her room to take a shower, and feels a clammy hand touch her back. She screams, and the others come running to her aid. They find that someone had dangled seaweed from a hook on her ceiling, apparently trying to scare her to death. After a short period of time, they realize that Wargrave wasn't with them. They return to the sitting room, and find him still sitting in his chair. After a close examination, Dr. Armstrong declares him dead; he was shot through the head.
That night, Dr. Armstrong leaves the house, and when the other three survivors search for him, all they can find is a smashed window and yet another figurine missing from the table.
Vera, Inspector Blore, and Lombard think it best to go outside when morning arrives. Blore later returns to the house to get some sustenance, and a dull thud is heard. When Vera and Philip come to see what happened, they find Blore dead, his head crushed by a heavy marble clock. They assume Doctor Armstrong did it and decide to stay out of the house.
The pair then walks along the cliffs to find Armstrong drowned. Vera and Lombard then realize that they are the only two left. Even though neither could possibly have murdered the Inspector, the suspicion has driven them to a breaking point and each of them assumes the other to be the murderer.
Vera tricks Lombard into helping her lift Armstrong's body out of reach of the water, and while Lombard is busy, she snatches his revolver. Lombard then reaches for his revolver, only to discover that Vera has pickpocketed it. She shoots him and then returns to the house, thinking she is finally safe. When Vera gets to her room, she discovers a noose (rope) hanging there, with a chair under it. Having finally been driven mad by the entire experience – along with terrible feelings of guilt for her actions – she breaks down and hangs herself in the room, thus fulfilling the final verse of the rhyme:
One little indian boy left all alone;
he went and hanged himself, and then there were none.
[edit] Epilogue
The epilogue to the novel consists of a conversation between two police detectives concerning the unsolved mystery. They have concluded from the physical evidence and various characters' diaries and journal entries that Blore, Armstrong, Lombard and Claythorne were definitely the last to die, thus one of them must have been the killer. However, Blore could not have died last, as the clock was definitely dropped onto him from above, and it would've been impossible for him to have the bear fall on him. Armstrong could not have: his drowned body was dragged above the high-tide mark by someone else. Lombard could not have, since he was shot on the beach and the revolver was found upstairs in the doorway of Wargrave's room. That left Vera (whose fingerprints are on the pistol and from whose window was dropped the clock on Blore), who hanged herself from the ceiling... but the chair from which she leapt with the noose around her neck was found pushed against the wall, out of reach from where she might have stood on it. Hence, although one of the guests must have been the killer, none of them could have been. Isaac Morris, the man who made all the arrangements for the island, can't tell them anything: he died of an overdose the day the party set sail. (Oddly the police don't seem to realize the pattern of the island killings is in the rhyme, which ironically is in each victim's room.)
The postscript consists of a letter which solves the mystery. The late Judge Lawrence Wargrave wrote the letter to explain that he had planned the killings to punish those who had committed murder, whether accidentally or not, but who had managed to escape the legal consequences. Wargrave first freely divulges his own hunger for blood, combined with his desire for strict justice (he never was able to punish someone whom he honestly thought of as innocent) and his delight in seeing the guilty punished. When a physician told Wargrave he was dying, he decided to go out in a dramatic fashion which would satiate his inner urges, rather than letting his life slowly trickle away.
Thus, he details how he picked his victims, including the drug-dealing Morris, (he mostly heard about the cases in the course of his work, and even met the man whose life was ruined after Vera, his lover, caused the death of his beloved nephew, wanting to make him the inheritor of the boy's fortune) and how he murdered Morris, Marston, Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, Macarthur, and Emily Brent. He then deceived Dr. Armstrong into pronouncing him "dead", this allowing the two to meet by the cliffs to discuss a strategy for determining the killer's identity. When Armstrong arrived, Wargrave shoved him over the edge, then went back to the house and pretended to be dead. His trick made it possible for him to kill Blore and orchestrate the deaths of Lombard and Vera.
After Vera (the guiltiest of the "condemned" according to the judge, since she deliberately killed an innocent child for his inheritance but managed to pass as a heroine who tried to rescue the boy) hanged herself, Wargrave, who had been watching from the bedroom closet, pushed the chair against the wall. He then wrote out his final message, putting the message in a bottle and casting the bottle into the sea. He states that his only regret is that it was not enough to invent an unsolveable mystery – he wishes someone would realize just how clever he has been – therefore he explains three clues which point to him as the killer, in case his letter is not found:
- Wargrave mentions in the letter that Edward Seton's death was justified because the police knew that he was guilty. Therefore, Wargrave was the only guest who did not murder anyone.
- The "red herring" line in the poem suggests the fact that Armstrong was tricked into his death.
- The bullet would leave a red mark in Wargrave's forehead similar to the mark of Cain, the first murderer in the Old Testament.
The conclusion of the judge's letter indicates that he planned to shoot himself whilst sitting on his bed, so that his body would fall onto the bed as if it had been laid there. He fastened the gun to the doorknob with a piece of elastic cord in such a way that the recoil would snap the gun out into the hallway as the door to his room closed. Thus the police found ten dead bodies and an unsolvable mystery on Indian Island.
[edit] Film, TV and theatrical adaptations
In 1943, Agatha Christie adapted the story for the stage. In the process of doing so, she realized that the novel's grim conclusion would not work dramatically on stage, so she reworked the ending for Lombard and Vera to be innocent of the crimes they were accused of, survive, and fall in love. The story was adapted for the cinema and television movies as:
- And Then There Were None (1945)
- Ten Little Niggers (1949)
- Ten Little Indians (1959) (as a truncated television recording of the play)
- Ten Little Indians (1965)
- Gumnaam (1965) (uncredited adaptation)
- And Then There Were None (1974)
- Desyat Negrityat ("Ten Little Negroes") (1987)
- Ten Little Indians (1989)
Many of the films follow the play's humorous tone and more optimistic ending. A newer version of the play was adapted for stage in October 2005, which followed the book a bit more closely.
[edit] "Ten little Indians" & "And Then There Were None" in popular culture
The memes "ten little Indians" and "and then there was one" have been used many times in modern days to refer to situations in stories – such as slasher films, other horror films, and disaster films — in which the characters die off one by one. This is how many films of those genres are structured in order to both provide gory scenes periodically, and to ultimately force the main character to face off against the villain alone. This main character in slasher films is often referred to as the "final girl" and shares many similarities with the doomed Vera Claythorne, the final victim in Christie's novel.
[edit] Trivia
- The 2003 film Identity, starring John Cusack, Ray Liotta, and Amanda Peet is loosely based on And Then There Were None.
- And Then There Were None was adapted from Agatha Christie's book into a video game in 2005 by The Adventure Company.
- "Ten Little Indians" is a song by Harry Nilsson along the same lines with the rhyme, although more dismal. In the song, the death of each "Indian" is related to breaking one of the Ten Commandments.
- A Japanese doujin game, Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, features an extra stage of a girl having the spell card named "And Then Will There be None?" and a theme music named "Is she the U.N. Owen?" (U.N. Owen is the killer's alias used in the novel, play, and films--as in "unknown.")
- "Zehn Kleine Jägermeister" (Ten Little "Jägermeister") is a song by the German band Die Toten Hosen, along the same lines as the rhyme, but with funny or satirical things happening to the characters (taking drugs, being arrested for tax evasion, dying of mad cow disease, etc.)
- The Polish film Show, starring Cezary Pazura, tells the story of a reality show located on a remote island. Suddenly, the competitors start to die one after another. One of the competitors mentions Agatha Christie's novel.
- A musical comedy spoof of the novel, titled Something's Afoot, enjoyed a brief run on Broadway.
- "Ten Little Indians" is the first phrase and recurring theme of the lyric to the song "Only One Woman," written by Reinhold Bilgeri, which was a UK hit in 1969 for Graham Bonnet and Trevor Gordon under the name of The Marbles.
- The Ben 10 episode name "And Then There Were 10" is a parody of the novel.
- A quest in the Xbox 360 and PC game, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion is based on the novel.
- A Halloween episode of Boy Meets World titled "And Then There Was Shawn" features the group being killed off one by one.
- An episode of Gunsmoke {#619/Season 20} "The Fourth Victim" has citizens of Dodge City being killed off one by one.
- An episode of The Wild Wild West has West and Gordon amid a group of strangers trapped on a island while they are killed off one by one.
- An episode of Quincy M.E. {#143/Season 8} "Murder on Ice" has Quincy and his girlfriend amid a group of strangers trapped in a snow lodge while they are killed off one by one.
- The 1985 comedy film Clue based on the board game Clue, contains a similar premise, with seven strangers being lured to a party by an anonymous host, who was blackmailing each of them for various crimes or embarrassing revelations. Unlike Christie's novel, the guests themselves are not killed, although the host, his hired help, and several visitors are.
[edit] External links
- http://www.all-about-agatha-christie.com/and-then-there-were-none.html
- Blog entry with links about the Gielgud production of the play (2005/2006)
- Spark Notes for book
- The Rhyme
