Women Can Be Scary Part I: Agatha Christie

At some point in my young reading life, I think when I was in junior high, I read quite a few Agatha Christie mysteries. I still fondly remember the plots of Murder on the Orient Express and The Mirror Crack’d, but I’m pretty sure I never read And Then There Were None, considered Christie’s masterpiece. Unlike most of Christie’s novels, this mystery does not feature a detective like Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple sleuthing a path to the final revelation of the murderer’s identity. Instead, the reader watches the sudden, sometimes violent deaths of character after character, as they try to figure out for themselves who is behind it.

As the mystery unfolds, we witness an unlikely group of individuals en route to Soldier Island, a remote but renowned private island off the coast of Devon and formerly owned by a Hollywood star. Some arrive under the impression that they have employment there, others are expecting a welcome holiday at the invitation of the Mr. and Mrs. Owen. But on the first evening, events take a sinister turn. After the eight guests and two servants have finished dinner, a voice from nowhere accuses each of them of murder, and the children’s rhyme about ten little soldiers begins to play itself out in macabre fashion.

This truly is a mystery masterpiece. The reader and the characters await in suspense to see which will be the next victim and how that person will die in accordance with the rhyme. We also slowly learn the events of each character’s past and why they have each been accused of murder. Are they really guilty? Or is some madman at work? Is there an eleventh person on the island killing them off one by one, or is the mastermind one of the ten? The final answer is revealed in a creative epilogue.

Christie was very proud of this particular novel and critics rate it as one of the most difficult to write. The ten background stories for the characters are quite ordinary, which makes the prospect that each could’ve committed murder all the more disturbing. Moreover, the characters represent all walks of life — servants, a judge, a doctor, a teacher, a policeman, a morally upright spinster, a retired general. The very people we trust to do jobs that ensure order and safety could abuse their authority in unobtrusive ways that lead to harm and get away with it. Long before the X Files, Christie wrote a story that seems to tell us to trust no one. Good, scary fun to read.