"And Then There Were None" Book Review, Summary & Analysis

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"And Then There Were None" Book Review, Summary & Analysis

Content Introduction

And Then There Were None is a detective fiction novel by Agatha Christie. 

In the novel, ten people, who have previously been complicit in the deaths of others but have escaped notice or punishment, are tricked into coming onto an island. 

Even though the guests are the only people on the island, they are all mysteriously murdered one by one, in a manner paralleling, inexorably, and sometimes grotesquely.

Some people are so bold as to reveal the true evil in the first sentence of the first chapter and page of the novel!!! 

After reading the last confession, it feels like clearing away the fog of the case and picking up the scattered clues piece by piece. to return to the perfect murder case. 

In fact, I always feel worried when reading my grandma’s mystery novels. Because I am very afraid of memorizing the complicated names of characters in novels, which makes me want to die! 

Secondly, I don’t know whether my grandma writes slowly and slowly, which makes me lose my mind when I read it. 

What I have to reveal is that not only was I stupid like the police who cleaned up the mess, but I didn't guess the real murder until all ten people were killed. 

What's even more ridiculous is that before I read the confession, I thought I was smart enough to conclude that the murderer was Fred, the kayaker. 

What did grandma think?! What did you think?! Not only was the applause so wonderful that I almost cried!

Book: And Then There Were None

• Author: Agatha Christie
• Original title: Ten Little Niggers
• Cover artist: Stephen Bellman
• Country: United Kingdom
• Language: English
• Genre: Mysterycrimepsychological thriller
• Publisher: Collins Crime Club
• Publication date: 6 November 1939
• Pages: 272
• Preceded by: Murder Is Easy 
• Followed by: Sad Cypress 
• Website: And Then There Were None

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

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About the Author

Agatha Christie is known as the queen of detective novels. Her books have sold more than 1 billion copies in English and have been translated into more than 100 languages, with sales of more than 1 billion copies. She wrote 80 detective novels and short story collections, 19 screenplays, and 6 novels published under the pseudonym Mary West McCourt. The number of works is second only to Shakespeare.

Agatha Christie's first novel, "The Mysterious Case at Styles Park," was written at the end of World War I, during which she served as a volunteer ambulance crew. In this novel, she created a cute little Belgian detective Hercule Pogge, who became the most popular detective image among readers after Sherlock Holmes. 

In 1926, Agatha Christie wrote her famous work "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" (also translated as "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd"). In 1952, her most famous play "The Mousetrap" was put on the stage and has been performed continuously since then for a long time, setting an unprecedented record in the history of world drama.

In 1971, Agatha Christie was knighted by the Queen of England. In 1975, Ingrid Bergman won her third Oscar for the film "Murder on the Orient Express" based on Agatha's novel of the same name. Agatha's hundreds of millions of admirers include prominent figures including Queen Elizabeth II and French President Charles de Gaulle.

In 1976, she bid farewell to the people who loved her at the age of 85.

Related Topics:

• Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
• And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

Book Summary

After reading many of my grandma's books, I finally bought this famous book "No Survival". I heard that it is Grandma's masterpiece, but after reading it, I can only say that I am a little disappointed, not for anything else, but for those who are either serious or minor. I looked through the book reviews briefly, but I didn’t see much that could resolve the logic bug.

1. It is written in the book that 'the order of death on the island was carefully arranged by me after careful consideration', which means that the judge has already decided who will die first and who will die later, but there is a problem here. The second deceased, Mrs. Rogers, was caused by taking an overdose of Trisulfone mixed with alcohol, but how did the judge determine that she would have fainted after listening to the accusation on the record? If she had not fainted, she might not have drank. How the judge killed her and made sure she died a second time and died just like in that poem.

2. Similar to the bug above, how did the judge know that the third deceased general would be alone at the beach? If he was not alone but stayed with someone, he would not be able to commit the murder described in the poem...

3. This is a bug that everyone is confused about. How could the doctor be so gullible in the judge’s plan? No one noticed that the judge was pretending to be dead. No one could tell the difference between a bullet hole and a small piece of red mud. Even if they didn't get closer to observe, didn't they notice it at all when they moved the body? After the judge faked his death, the doctor if he was not particularly stupid, would have thought that if the judge was not the real murderer, then the real murderer would be panicked and exposed after discovering that the judge was killed in a poetic way, but there was no reaction from anyone. Unlike others, wouldn't the doctor have imagined that he had been deceived by the judge?

4. How did the judge know that Vera would definitely go back to her room to wash her face? Assuming that Vera did not go back to the room at all, but went to the kitchen to wash his face, or stayed with everyone until going to bed at night and then went upstairs to the room with everyone, his plan to lure everyone away would have failed, then he There is no way to fake death. If he had not faked his death, the subsequent murders would not have been completed smoothly.

5. When only Vera and Lombard were left, Vera asked him "How did the Stone Bear's trick work?" Why did he answer "It was magic". Since he was not the murderer, why didn't he question Vera? , or why he didn't think that when Vera questioned him since neither of them was the murderer, someone was faking their death. But from an emotional point of view, this is not a too serious bug. After all, not dying in that situation is half crazy, and you may not know what you are saying.

The last thing I want to say is that the reason why I feel disappointed is that for a mystery novel, no matter how fascinating the plot is and how well the atmosphere is rendered, if it lacks the most basic logic, it is not a proper novel. 

As Grandma herself said: The stories in the book are difficult to write, the plots cannot be too absurd, and the murderers cannot be too obvious. "And Then There Were None" feels like an extraordinary inspiration, but it is a pity to abandon it, and it is too difficult to write. 

The plot is so intricate that Grandma herself cannot bring it back. There is also the description of the character's psychology. After knowing the murderer, and looking back at the psychology of everyone before, you will find that the judge's psychology is very unreasonable. 

Grandma does not have this kind of unreasonableness in her other novels. Reasonable psychological description. There is a sense of deliberate effort to prevent people from guessing the murderer, which is completely below her standards.

Of course, for such a story, Grandma did a very good job. After all, "And Then There Were None" is not like her usual style. This subject matter may be a bit difficult for her, but the idea and main structure of the story are indeed Superb, the grasp of the atmosphere and environment is also first-rate, which can be regarded as making up for the flaws in logic and reasoning. As the recommendation says: Create a new model

Book Review

There are only ten people on the desert island, and one of them is the murderer. But they died one after another, and And Then There Were None. So who is the murderer? Was he the last person to die? If not, how can he or she continue to carry out his or her murderous plan after death? Why did he (she) kill people, and why did he/she label himself/herself as dead?

　　In "And Then There Were None," Agatha Christie clearly pushed herself into a creative danger. Faced with this situation, detective novel authors have two choices. One is to use genius ideas to justify themselves, and the other is to talk nonsense using inferior means such as "psychological suspense" and "fantasy" - ever since "The Da Vinci Code" became popular, "suspense writers" who pretend to be fake are popping up all the time. There are simply too many such stories to fool people.

　　"And Then There Were None" was published two years later than "Tragedy on the Nile" and has a completely different style. "Tragedy on the Nile" is keen on solving mysteries. After laying a complicated web, Detective Poirot uses careful reasoning to unravel the cocoon. "No Survival" is more willing to create a thriller atmosphere.

　　"Ten little soldiers, went out to eat. One was choked to death, and nine were left. Nine little soldiers stayed up late. One overslept, and eight were left. Eight little soldiers left for Devon. One There are seven people left to stay..." This old British nursery rhyme has become a thread throughout the novel. The ten victims died one after another as described in the ballad, giving it the color of a prophecy. It makes the text of this novel chill. There always seems to be a gibbering child's voice beside your ears, gently chanting this song. There is a hint of death in the careless tone as if a bloodthirsty expression suddenly appears on the innocent face, which makes people feel... Feeling invisible fear in the extreme contrast.

　　From sunny and sunny to misty and foggy, the island has turned from a resort into a hell on earth. This British novel will easily remind you of the British weather: rainy and cold. The sea in the dark night has hidden its majestic side, peering coldly at everything on the island. When the seaside becomes one of the murder scenes, the waves receding from the beach leave a trace of melancholy, making people worry about the kiss of death coming again. The confusion on the Nile disturbs the readers' intelligence, while the confusion in "No Survivor" disturbs people's heartstrings.

　　Christie seems convinced that human nature is inherently evil. We are most familiar with her three stories: "Death on the Nile", "Murder on the Orient Express" and "Crime in the Sun". In these murders, nearly everyone present at the scene has a motive. As Christie eliminates each suspect, he mocks their dark side.

　　"And Then There Were None" is no exception. The murderer placed a recording on the gramophone in advance and announced their crimes one by one after everyone arrived on the island. It turns out that every person who goes to the island hides a secret: an officer deliberately sends his subordinates to a dangerous place to vent his personal anger; a drunk doctor performs an operation while the patient dies; a girl deliberately creates an accident in order to help her lover obtain an inheritance... All were charged and the island became a place of judgment.

　　In a desperate situation, some people are calm because they have been unable to bear the pain caused by guilt for many years; some are disapproving because they have never complained about their sins; some are panicked, and some are sad. But no matter what, from the nobles to the bottom, everyone on the island has taken off the disguise of identity and revealed their truest side in the face of the cruelest reality. The longing for life is the thought of some people, and the longing for relief is what everyone hopes for difficulty or moral relief.

　　If there is Poirot's humor is a spice in the "Poirot Trilogy", then "And Then There Were None" is full of depressive pathos from beginning to end. Christie's taunts became less and less frequent, replaced by harsh criticism. At the same time, she also became more ruthless - that nursery rhyme was tantamount to a verdict. She sent these prisoners waiting for death to the execution ground, first letting them see the black hole of the gun muzzle, then covering their hoods, and then putting the muzzle of the gun on them. their foreheads. The agony of waiting brought an unbearable heaviness. Perhaps, when you read this book late at night, you will hear their gasps for breath.

　　"Who killed them?" This mystery continues to puzzle everyone until the end of the novel. Finally, a mysterious confession solves the mystery. What is truly astonishing is not the perpetrator's undetectable means of committing the crime, but his or her identity and motives. The sorrow of human nature cannot be suppressed in the final confession. The desert island in the sea is like the lost human heart, which becomes helpless in the reflection of sins and mistakes. Civilization is deserted on the small island, and everything in the moral exile is in depression, with no survivors. The novel becomes profound at this time. When later generations of readers repeatedly lament Christie's "dazzling" writing skills, it seems that they should not ignore the lamentations revealed in her writing.

Book Analysis

"And Then There Were None": People who talk about justice are the most terrifying

When I was watching Detective Conan as a child, there was often a plot like this: Conan Edogawa, Ran Mouri, Kogoro Mouri, and a group of people were invited by the garden to come to a mountain villa; there was a snowstorm that night, and the only suspension bridge leading to the outside world was cut off, and the villa lost contact with the outside world. After a scream, Conan must find the murderer among the guests in the villa...

Although "And Then There Were None" takes place on an uninhabited island rather than Blizzard Manor, the above is the Blizzard Manor model pioneered by Agatha Christie. Since its publication in 1939, "None Survived" has produced endless variations in later generations, from classical reasoning to Japanese novels. Countless writers have contributed their own wisdom under Christie's framework; however, from today's perspective, Looking back at this originator, it is difficult to classify it as a mystery novel: there is no obvious logic, chain of evidence, and not even a detective appears...

And Then There Were None

However, today, eighty years later, "And Then There Were None" still attracts many readers without being shackled by repeated patterns. When the BBC miniseries remake of "And Then There Were None" was aired in 2015, it ranked first among readers. The runner-up in Christmas ratings has sparked a lot of discussion among movie fans around the world, and shows no signs of being "outdated". It can be seen that there must be something "eternal" in "No Survival" - for example, the terrifying human heart and the terrifying human nature.

1. Horrifying Heart: The Hidden Life of the Middle Class

None of the nine victims in the novel are very kind. The dandy kid killed two children without any repentance; the Puritan old woman scorned the "not conservative enough" young women and drove the pregnant maid out of the house, causing the maid to die; the governess fell in love with herself The student's cousin said that he had no money to marry her, so she encouraged the student to swim in the sea and pretended that he was too late to save the student so that the cousin could inherit a large inheritance after the student drowned - she saw through the appearance of what she had done. Brother naturally left her.

The law could not make these people pay the price, so the seriously ill judge took action: "I hate that innocent people or creatures have suffered or died because of what I did. I have always felt deeply that justice should prevail against everything." The judge thought Before he died of illness, he cast his light into the corners where the law could not shine and invited nine guilty people to the isolated island, organized a mysterious "Last Supper", eliminated them one by one, and then committed suicide. end.

However, even those who were not guilty enough to die - such as the general who sent his subordinates to the battlefield because he discovered that he was having an affair with his wife - were brutally killed. The judge is like the serial killer in "Seven Deadly Sins". In order to satisfy his desire to kill, he must forcibly gather ten sins to correspond to the "Ten Little Blacks" nursery rhyme. He is the most "just", but also the most bloodthirsty, cruel, and crazy.

The judge in the British drama version is a gentleman

Christie used a lot of hallucinations, nightmares, and bad memories to present the characters' trance-like mental state. The judge who boarded the operating table after being drunk and accidentally killed a young patient often dreamed of the young patient's bloody face; after the murder, the old woman who had been indifferent to the death of the maid also panicked and wrote down in her diary, the murderer was the maid she kicked out back then. Ten "sinners" are living around us: they are gentle, diligent, and motivated, and may have a decent social status, but under the peaceful life there is hidden raging malice. After the malice is released, they are tortured by endless guilt. A single thought, There is no recovery.

The murderous island has become the salvation of some victims: Even if the one who judges me is the devil, I no longer have to bear the guilt...

2. Horrifying Human Nature: The Fable Behind Blizzard Villa

The horrifying human hearts are intertwined, and amplified by the massacre on the isolated island, they become horrifying human nature. They are suspicious of each other, they are terrified, and they go from being well-dressed to returning to the animal state, achieving the true fable of "And Then There Were None": stripping away modern civilization layer by layer.

"And Then There Were None" Book Review, Summary & Analysis

The first thing to be eliminated is class. Even though the housekeeper and his wife killed their hostess, they were always respectful to the guests who came to the island; the housekeeper's wife became the first victim, but after that, the housekeeper still concentrated on boiling water, chopping wood, and preparing dinner for the guests. , causing him to be alone and become the prey of the murderous judge. After the butler was killed, the guests who lost the service of servants had no choice but to eat canned food and wait for the end in carnival and revelry - class was gone and everyone was equal.

Then the law disappeared. The judge carefully planned a ritualistic death for himself. He died like a great judge but with the mark of Cain on his forehead. According to the Bible, Cain killed his brother Abel because he was jealous that he was more favored by God. This was the first crime of murder in the human world. This mark means that he also does not believe that what he is doing is in the name of justice.

In the end, when the other eight people were dead, the female teacher and the mercenary walked out of the villa, walked toward nature, and faced the sea. Using this as a starting point, they convinced each other that the other was the murderer, and started a life-and-death struggle: If you don't kill me, I will. Kill you, just like the animal state; the last shot fired by the female teacher at the mercenary marks the end of civilization.

3. The social scene in "And Then There Were None"

"There Are No Survivors", like other works of Agatha Christie, is essentially refined middle-class taste. The protagonists are a group of deviant middle-class and aristocratic people - that is, a group of over-disciplined people who have been depressed by guilt for a long time. This depression is conveyed to readers through countless nightmares and hallucinations, and through the big screen, The extremely crazy "deviant" feast of the massacre is released.

The British drama "And Then There Were None"

After the release, the reader's mood will also be a little subtle. Some characters in the book are always at large, and their deaths should be worthy of applause. But compared to this, a world without law is spine-chilling. What is even more shocking is that there is no evidence for everyone's guilt. , all collected by the judge himself, and it is up to the judge's personal judgment to decide who should be on his death list. Such a brutal trial makes people worry about whether the mistakes they have made will have to be repaid in a similar way.

The novel also has the ambition to construct a social panorama: each character is burdened with social conflicts that have not been resolved until eighty years later. The arrogant Puritan old woman who always carries the Bible and the pregnant maid who was kicked out of her home is a set of disputes about women's work, women's independence, and sexual liberation; the mercenary who killed 21 black people in Africa was killed without a trace. It is undoubtedly a symbol of racism; the doctor believes that only the judge belongs to the same class as himself, and he is sure that the judge will not be the murderer. He wants to form an alliance with the judge, but he falls into the judge's trap and becomes a victim of class prejudice...

"And Then There Were None" is naturally unable to solve the above problems. However, its thrilling atmosphere is essentially derived from a sense of powerlessness, and it is an inverted sense of powerlessness - the upper class versus the lower class, the colonizer versus the colonized, the doctor versus the patient, the healthy versus the sick, the powerful. For those who are suppressed, everyone is anxious about being backlashed by power, anxious about going to hell and suffering retribution.

Civilization creates civilization, and civilization also creates inequality. Guilt and powerlessness are integrated in Blizzard Villa. The ten sinners rely on civilization but are afraid of civilization, go deep into civilization, and want to break through civilization. The glory of civilization is stained with the blood of civilization. , we are small and fragile in civilization, this is "And Then There Were None".

Reading Notes

 After reading this, I only have one thought: it turns out that Granny Agatha is the originator of werewolf killing. His work " No Survivors " is an epic work that records the violent killing of four gods and five people by a single wolf.

First of all, Judge Wargrave is the only murderer, that is, the wolf. He became the police chief due to his respected status and has been guiding other people's thoughts for the rest of the time.

Armstrong was obviously a witch, and the antidote was deceived, and the poison accidentally killed Brent, the colonel's daughter. (On the surface, he was stung by a bee, but the actual cause of death was the doctor’s medicine)

The gun-carrying gangster Lombard was the hunter, but unfortunately, his gun was snatched away and he was killed.

The old General MacArthur was a prophet and accurately predicted that everyone would die on the island.

Blore is a guard. He is strong and always protects others.

Mr. and Mrs. Rogers were lovers. Unfortunately, God had a bug. When one of them died, the other did not die.

Vera, Brent, Marston, and Couple are all people.

Two villages (Marston and Mrs. Rogers ) were stabbed to death in the first two nights, but the prophet found nothing. On the third night, they were stabbed to death as soon as they jumped.

On the fourth night, villager Rogers was stabbed.

The witch poisoned a village to death on the fifth night. On the sixth day, the werewolf bit himself to trick the antidote and successfully obtained the witch's silver water. On the seventh day, the werewolf angrily slashed the witch, on the eighth day, he killed the guards, on the ninth day, he bit the hunter to death, and finally, he used psychological tactics to kill the last civilian.

In the end, the werewolf committed suicide to pay tribute to the struggling villagers.

Grandma will be able to fool everyone when she plays Werewolf.