By Tara Makhija
And Then There Were None, arguably Agatha Christie’s most famous novel, has inspired an entire generation of books, movies, and video games. I read it for the first time as an assigned reading in middle school, and that book served as the gateway to Agatha Christie’s other works and an entire genre of mystery in my future. The story is well-known with much appeal for its suspense, which makes it a common required reading for students. That being said, regardless of whether the reader has engaged with the book in the past, they likely find the premise familiar. Especially if the reader has seen works like the movie adaptation of the popular board game “Clue”, they will recognize the following similarities, among other things:
- A group of strangers having been invited to a remote mansion without easy means of egress
- A host unknown to any of the strangers, who doesn’t show face immediately upon arrival
- Evidence unveiled against each guest for committing a crime they had gotten away with
- One by one murder of the guests, and the realization that one of them is the murderer
While the Clue movie served as a more comedic parody of And Then There Were None, the latter proved more sinister in tone through a more restricting sense of entrapment, a sense of “justice” associated with each murder, and a more ominous sense of inevitability. While the Clue movie kept guests trapped in the residence through locking the main mansion door and vicious guard dogs, a truly terrified guest likely would have chosen the dogs over a potential death, giving them the possibility to have broken window glass in attempts to escape. This option is not available in And Then There Were None, which takes place on a remote island that can only be left through a boat that did not arrive. Furthermore, the desire for murder in Clue stemmed primarily as a desire of preventing the guest from being blackmailed in the future. This is dissimilar to that of And Then There Were None, where murder came from Wargrave’s perverted desire for justice. This is an important distinction to note, as while blackmail is enough of a motive for a person to commit murder, justice is a motive that stems past the individual, and could be seen as of a broader scope. That sense of broader scope creates a sense of “right” and “wrong”, playing on the guilt of characters and leading to the next major difference between the two works, a sense of determinism in And Then There Were None.
From the start, Clue dispelled any notions of determinism within the movie. The characters were granted agency within their own lives, and the opportunity to kill either the butler or the blackmailer with weapons provided to them. While the blackmailer or butler may have had their own prepared plans for the events that would unfold, these plans relied on encouraging guests to act in a certain way, rather than committing any of the actions themselves. This created a sense of inconclusiveness in the movie, with even the planners unsure of how the night would unfold. This idea of uncertainty is further demonstrated through the movie format itself, which featured 3 alternate endings. In And Then There Were None however, there was a sense of inevitability from the first murder. This was created through a variety of motifs and events throughout the story: the missing figurines representing each death, the link between the murders and the children’s nursery rhyme, and more generally, a sense that each murder was committed “for the greater good”, and that the actions each character had committed in the past had already condemned them to their fate. To reiterate, while characters in both And Then There Were None and Clue had committed some sort of heinous act in the past, they were only murdered for such acts in And Then There Were None, whereas in Clue they were murdered more for the current threat they portrayed (due to blackmail, etc). This all worked to create the sense of inevitability that led to the final death–not a murder but a suicide, with the last victim only being provided the means to kill themself. Instead of being killed, they chose to kill themself for a sense of poetic closure linked to the idea that from the beginning, they were already dead. That idea is likely part of the reason why the novel is so successful. The reader finds themself unsure of not only who the murderer is but if they’ll be caught in time, instead of assuming that good will always win in the end. The sense of uncertainty And Then There Were None cultivates adds to the suspense, which is only amplified with the murderer’s prioritization of justice over his own life. As such, while many pieces of media find themselves inspired by And Then There Were None or strive to achieve that level of acclaim, Christie’s creation of senses of entrapment, justice, and inevitability make the novel difficult to replicate.
Intermittent Mechanism 