And Then There Were None is a detective novel that first appears to us to abide by all the established rules of fair play. But, upon closer inspection, we find that Christie has violated several well established rules, both from the set we concocted in class, and those drawn from elsewhere, and often in an egregious manner. At the on-set Christie seems to be providing us with a situation so fair and just to the reader that it sickens us. Ten perfect strangers, all trapped on an island. Their desires and motives unknown or obfuscated, any one of them could be the killer. And indeed, by the end of the book, Christie has ostensibly followed our rules to the letter. She does not avail herself of a supernatural or otherwise “cheap” solution to the ultimate “locked room” (or perhaps “locked island” would be more appropriate here). Instead, the culprit is one of the characters we were introduced to at the beginning of the story. She does not introduce an unknown third party who is responsible, and who it would have been impossible for the reader to guess at. She does not point to some specter or ghoul, but a flesh and blood man, and a man the reader was intimately familiar with at that. So where is the cheat? Where has she led us astray? Let’s begin at the beginning.
Her first trick lies in her set-up. Providing the reader with all ten suspects from the get-go, and indeed allowing them all to be our guides through the story seems like a generous move on the part of the author, but in reality it violates one of the first rules of fair play: consistent viewpoint. There can be only one. A characteristic that must be shared by all law-abiding detective novels is the presence of one and only one viewpoint through which the reader experiences the story. Having multiple perspectives as Christie does, lends more credibility to the story on its face, as the reader now has multiple points of access and more lenses with which to view the world, but in reality only serves to “muddy the waters,” so to speak. The potential for more variety of information that we gain from listening to multiple narrators is hugely offset by how unreliable ten voices shouting different versions of the same events soon becomes.
The second befuddlement lies in the death of Judge Wargrave. I said at the beginning that to her credit, Christie doesn’t resort to “cheap” tricks, but this device comes quite close. In allowing a murder victim to “rise from the dead”, she has subverted not only the rules of the genre, but also her own. Previously, suspects were eliminated from the mind of the reader when they were killed, “proved innocent by way of their death”, but Wargrave is the exception. And in being the only exception, she renders her own ending arbitrary in a sense. This is not to say that there was no way for the reader to know, but guessing at Wargaves’ guilt requires such a substantial leap in logic that it doesn’t allow for us to consider it “fair play”, at least under any reasonable definition of the word. Aside from its use as a literary concept, there is also an issue with how it is carried out in practice. To put it frankly, it was unbelievable in hindsight. Some might argue that the brilliance of the twist is in how believable the Judge’s death seemed at first, but I would argue that its believability is its greatest fault. The truth of the matter is so impractical, so fantastical, that the reader has no choice but to believe the false narrative present, but this is not a stroke of genius on Christie’s part, but instead an infraction on the rules of logical deduction wrapped in the veneer of wit.
The final breach I’ll discuss today again concerns narration. As we discussed in class on the 24th, an author must take care when hiding and disguising information from the reader. To use the example of the phone call from Prof. Jones’ slideshow, if the story is told from the detective’s perspective, the author cannot in good conscience obscure the contents of a phone call received by the detective from the reader. It would contrast harshly with the sense of closeness one feels when experiencing a detective novel through the detective’s eye’s, and it is not a pill the reader would easily swallow. They would be understandably distraught at suddenly being yanked out the detective’s mind when they were once allowed free reign in it. So too, if the story is given in some flavor of omniscient or semi-omniscient perspective, does the reader have trouble swallowing the omission of the phone call’s contents. It is only if Watson tells us that Sherlock receives a call, that the reader is satisfied not being privy to the call’s contents. And here, Christie commits another transgression. In the first few pages of the novel, she boldly introduces us to our killer-to-be, unbeknownst to us at the time, of course. And yet, though he is readily and giddily planning to murder nine strangers on an island, some in particularly brutal ways, none of this is betrayed to us at the time of his introduction. Obviously, it couldn’t be, or else she might as well have ended the book at the second page, but therein lies the problem. She cannot simultaneously present to us the inner workings of the characters’ minds, their thoughts and feelings and at the same time leave out that one of the characters we have been living within is a psychotic serial killer.
But maybe the fault lies with the reader. Maybe we should be amazed that Christie snuck this right under our noses, and indeed, when one goes back over what they read previously, they may be inclined to chastise themself for not seeing what now appear to be “obvious” clues, or to draw flimsy connections where none actually existed in order to justified Christie’s shocking reveal. I submit they should not avail themself of this feeling, and instead try and take a logical and unbiased look at what is before them. Difficult as this is, I believe that when it is done, the reader will realize that all those supposed connections they drew, and many of the “clues” they missed resulted purely from the knowledge they now possess about the ending of the book. Indeed, even the early forays in Wargrave’s mind, when glanced back upon do nothing to indict him as the guilty party. How is it that we are in the head of a murderer, but don’t take him for a murderer? Some may say this is proof of a brilliant writer, but I take it as proof that Christie didn’t read the relevant literature on the rules of fair play as they pertain to detective novels.
Intermittent Mechanism 