And Then There Were None

I'm not a huge murder mystery buff like my girlfriend, but like everyone else I appreciate a good one now and again. And Then There Were None is a great one. Published in 1939 (originally as Ten Little Niggers), it's full of all kinds of cliches: a dark and stormy night or two, ten strangers with guilt-ridden pasts, and murder accusations flying all over the place. At first, the book was a bit hard to get into. The first twenty or thirty pages deal almost exclusively with character introduction. In a nutshell, they were pretty boring. Fortunately, the book really picked up once all the guests arrived at "Indian Island" ("Nigger Island" in the original British version, "Soldier Island" in what must be some new and politically correct version). One by one, the ten house guests meet their demises. I won't spoil anything major - the victim order, the whodunit, or just how many people make it out alive. Suffice it to say, as the body count adds up and the house guests dwindle in number, the mood darkens quickly. The first two deaths, for example, are seen as unhappy accidents. By the third kill, the people begin to suspect that a murderer is loose on the island. Further examinations and killings, however, lead them all to believe that one of them is, in fact, the murderer. Again, thunderstorms and noises in the darkness are such tried and tested plot devices in murder mysteries, but Agatha Christie used them with purpose and skill in telling the story of a mass murder. Now, much of the reader's final judgment of any mystery is based upon how well the mystery was sustained and solved from start to finish. No one wants to be insulted by a book, figuring out an obvious answer long before any of the dumbed down characters. On the contrary, nobody wants an ending to come out of nowhere; the answer to any good mystery should be one the reader was fully capable of entertaining, at the very least. For me, And Then There Were None met these requirements. I had several ideas throughout my reading of the book, and the ultimate answer was kind of a combination of a few of them while at the same time being nothing I was expecting. If you haven't read And Then There Were None, I highly recommend it. It's barely two-hundred pages long and it holds your interest very well. I finished it in just two sittings, one of which was only spent on the first (boring) thirty pages. There's a reason it's the sixth-most sold book originally published in the English language. Side note: the five ahead of it include A Tale of Two Cities and The Lord of the Rings - fair enough - in addition to the Boy Scout handbook and two religious texts: the Book of Mormon and The Truth That Leads to Eternal Life (Jehovah's Witnesses). Very interesting array, those top five English language books. Anyway, Agatha Christie impressed me enough with this murder mystery to consider checking out more of her work. But not yet. Not yet.