And Then There Were None
| And Then There Were None | ||||||||||||
|
Hardcover - UK - 1st edition (original title). |
||||||||||||
|
And Then There Were None, originally published with the highly racist title, Ten Little N*ggers, is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie first published on 1939-11-06.
The book is about ten people, each with a dark past, who have been tricked onto an island only to discover their unknown host intends to kill them off one-by-one.
Personal
| Own? | No. |
| Read? | Audiobook read by Hugh Fraser. |
| Finished | 2021-07-24 |
I've always heard that this book was good, a great example of early murder mystery fiction, and highly influential to the genre, so I decided to give it a try. While researching the book for this article, I discovered its original title and was quite shocked.
Review
|
Overall: |
|
— This section contains spoilers! —
Good
- Christie does a great job setting the mood and creating an air of mystery as the guests make their way to the island.
- I like the premise of having one of the guests be the murderer. It creates a lot of tension between the characters as they try to identify the killer while everyone is being murdered around them. This caused me to try and identify the murderer along the way.
Bad
- With such a large cast of characters, I initially found it difficult to picture them all in my head at the same time. A bit more backstory or description for each character would have helped.
- While I liked the clues and red herrings described through the book, I don't feel as though Christie gave enough evidence for anyone to actually solve the mystery, even for the most attentive readers.
Ugly
- The original title, the cover illustration, and the nursery rhyme used throughout the book, are all horribly racist.
- While a couple of the murders don't seem too difficult to pull off, several of them seem highly suspect. For example, slipping poison into a person's glass and being sure both that they would drink it with none of the nine other people in the room with you would notice, is difficult, but doable. However, being able to convince someone to walk down a specific path at a specific time, and also being able to accurately drop a statue on them, would be much harder. Convincing a stranger to help you fake your death and convincingly lie to everyone else would be harder still, and persuading a person to hang themself, without ever even talking to them, would be near-impossible. Doing this ten times in a row without without ever being caught is totally unbelievable.
Media
UK first edition hardcover.
USA first edition hardcover.
Adaptions
Due to the popularity of this book, it's main theme has been used dozens of times by other forms of media like Murder By Death, the video game Mystery House, and the film adaption of Clue.
Links
