10 minutes to And Then There Were None — one island, one nursery rhyme, ten china figures, ten ways to die

Opening: one island, ten china figures

On an island off the Devon coast shaped like a soldier's head, ten small white china figures sit on the long dining table of a rented villa. Nobody thinks twice about them at first. Each guest has been invited separately by a mysterious ‘Mr. and Mrs. Owen,’ and none of them know each other. Then a gramophone record starts playing that first night, and it reads out all ten names, one by one, each tied to an old case they thought they had gotten away with clean — a hit-and-run that killed a child, a poisoning that killed a mother in labor, an innocent man sent to prison to die there. The china figures are a countdown, and every guest is standing on their own number.

What this book is

This is And Then There Were None, written in 1939 by Agatha Christie, the queen of English crime fiction. It's her best-selling novel, with more than a hundred million copies sold worldwide, and it's the book that founded an entire subgenre: murder on a closed, isolated set where the killer is one of the trapped. Every novel, murder-mystery game, and thriller since that locks a group of strangers in one house and lets the killer strike from inside is, in some form, still running the structure she invented here.

Ten people, each carrying a death

None of them is here by accident — each was chosen with care. Retired judge Wargrave hands down sentences with unforgiving severity and thinks of himself as the law's own voice. The governess, Vera Claythorne, once stood by years ago and let a boy in her charge swim out toward the rocks and drown, for a man's sake. The mercenary Philip Lombard abandoned a party of native guides in Africa to die, and feels no remorse about it. The former policeman William Blore once put an innocent man in prison on perjured evidence. The spinster Emily Brent turned her pregnant maid out of the house and drove her to drown herself. The retired general Macarthur sent his wife's lover to a front line where death was certain, out of pure jealousy. Dr. Armstrong operated drunk, killed a woman in labor on the table, and covered it up to keep his license. The playboy Anthony Marston ran over two children in his car and went right back to his parties. And the butler and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, deliberately delayed getting help for the old woman who employed them, so they could collect what she'd left them.

Scotland Yard never solves it. When the authorities finally reach the island, all they find are ten bodies, each dead a different way — no outsider, no weapon left behind, no fingerprints. The whole thing has been scoured clean by the storm. Months later, a fishing boat pulls a bottle out of the sea, and inside is a confession Wargrave wrote and threw overboard himself before he died: the full history of the ten old cases, why he counted himself among the accused, and how a rubber band rigged the gun to fire itself long after he was already dead, faking his own suicide. It was the one thing this retired judge had wanted to do his whole life: run a trial for crimes the law couldn't reach, then slip away wearing the last victim's disguise.

What Christie is really writing about