And Then There Were None – Agatha Christie (William Collins Sons & Co. 1939)

Don’t you feel – all the time – that there’s someone. Someone watching and waiting?

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Agatha Christie loved a ‘locked-room’ (or train, boat or island) mystery and this is the one she claimed to have laboured hardest over. It’s been through a couple of ill-judged titles but the modern one indicates the plot’s arc: ten characters get whittled down to zero. At the start eight characters have each received a credible (though different) invitation to an overnight stay on Soldier Island, just off the south coast of England, to which they are all travelling. On the train down, one of the guests encounters a drunken old man who ‘smells’ a squall coming despite the glorious weather. As he stumbles from the train at his stop, he turns and urges the guest to ‘watch and pray’ because ‘the day of judgement is at hand’. Once the guests arrive on the island they can find no evidence of their host and then discover that it is not possible to leave. And so the puzzle begins.

Initially the characters seem an unlikely group for a house party – a pious spinster, a WWI general, a retired judge, a feckless playboy, etc. – but a connecting thread quickly emerges, as does a sort of pattern to the murders. Each is haunted to a greater or lesser degree by something from the past; no one seems to know who is behind their invitations (or their murders); and most become aware of the inexorability of the process they are part of long before their turns come. This inexorability is underlined by the flourish of having, in each of the guests’ rooms, a framed copy of the ‘Ten Little Soldiers’ nursery rhyme; moreover, ten porcelain figures stand on the dining room table, one of which is found smashed after each murder.

Of course, much depends on the increasing tension of their situation, which is down to the absolute necessity but apparent impossibility of escape. This is intensified by the fact that the mainland is in view, but uncontactable. The weather plays its part: the foreseen squall arrives and, as they’ve been told by the boatman who conducts them across the strait, the island is ‘sometimes…cut off for a week or more.’ Many of the guests feel uneasy on arrival and General Macarthur thinks it a ‘Damned odd sort of place’ as he disembarks. Once the boat has gone, the only two people they find on the island are the house servants – a married couple – who seem just as mysterious. One of the female guests immediately thinks the wife ‘looked like a woman in mortal fear…’.

The book’s great strength is the way Christie portrays the effects of the psychological pressure ‘of danger undefined and tinged with the supernatural’ operating on her characters. To know a killer is on the island with you, that he or she means to kill you, and to think that you might be speaking to, or even allying yourself with him or her at that very moment…. And that can only get worse as the numbers decrease.