On the first evening on the island, the guests are drinking coffee after dinner when a voice speaks from a gramophone record. It names every person in the room, one after another, and charges each of them with a death the law never punished. That is the moment the And Then There Were None book turns from a strange holiday into a trap. The mystery novel appeared in 1939 from Collins Crime Club. You will not find Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple here. This Agatha Christie novel has only ten strangers and an empty sea.
What Happens in the And Then There Were None Book?
One August, eight people who have never met are lured to Soldier Island, a lonely rock off the Devon coast. Some are offered a job, some a holiday, some a reunion with old friends. The hosts have not yet arrived. The butler and his wife, newly hired, meet the guests instead.
A framed copy of an old nursery rhyme hangs in every bedroom, and ten small figurines stand on the dining table. After the recorded message accuses them all, the first of the guests dies of cyanide poisoning within minutes. As the guests start to die one by one, each death follows a verse of the rhyme, and each time a figurine disappears. A storm stops the boat from the mainland, so no one can come or go. When they search the island and find no one else, the survivors understand that the unknown host is not coming. The murderer must be one of the guests.
The Ten People on the Island
Christie gives each of the ten main characters a crime they claim they did not commit, or say was not a crime at all:
- Lawrence Wargrave, a retired judge known for sending men to the gallows
- Vera Claythorne, a games mistress and former governess, invited as a secretary
- Philip Lombard, a soldier of fortune who has brought a revolver
- Emily Brent, an elderly and rigidly pious spinster
- General Macarthur, a retired officer from the First World War
- Dr Edward Armstrong, a Harley Street doctor who once operated while drunk
- Anthony Marston, a rich and reckless young man with a fast car
- William Blore, a former police inspector, now a private investigator
- Thomas and Ethel Rogers, the butler and the cook
Behind them all stands the absent host, Mr and Mrs U.N. Owen. Read the name aloud and it becomes “unknown”. None of the ten characters is a hero, and one of the characters is lying about far more than a past crime.
Our Review: A Thriller With No Detective to Save Anyone
Most Christie novels are built around a detective who restores order in the last chapter. This one takes the detective away. Nobody on the island is there to solve the crime, and the reader is left alone with the suspects. The result reads more like a psychological thriller than a classic whodunit, and it is the tightest book Christie wrote. There is not a wasted scene in the whole book.
The rhyme is the clever part. You know roughly how the next guest will die, and you still cannot see who is doing it. The storm, the shrinking group and the missing figurines build real dread without any gore. Christie scatters red herrings with a steady hand. We guessed wrong until the confession at the end, and we suspect most readers do. We would recommend this book to anyone who thinks they always spot the killer.
The first chapters introduce many characters in quick succession, so the start is slow. And the book shows its age. The text includes an anti-Semitic portrait of a minor character, and the first title was a racial slur (more on that below).
Is It Agatha Christie’s Darkest Book?
It is often called one of her darkest, and the official Agatha Christie site describes it that way. There is no consensus on a single darkest title. Some critics give that place to Endless Night (1967), a later standalone about human evil. What makes this novel so bleak is that nobody arrives to put things right. Sarah Phelps, who wrote the 2015 BBC version, said she was struck by how stark and brutal the novel is.
Themes: Guilt, Justice and a Troubled Conscience
Every guest has escaped justice, at least in the eyes of the law. The book asks who has the right to punish them, and it never gives a comfortable answer. Guilt is the second theme. Most of the guests deny the charge at dinner, but alone at night they cannot stop thinking about it. The third is fear. Once the group knows the killer is among them, trust collapses, and the survivors start watching each other instead of the sea.
Famous Quotes From the Book
The line readers remember comes early, when Dr Armstrong first sees the island: “There was something magical about an island.” It sounds like a holiday brochure, and it is meant to. Two other moments are just as well known. The judge soon tells the others that their host is surely a madman, and a dangerous one. And the gramophone voice opens its speech by calling the room to silence, like a court.
What the Title Means, and the Title It Replaced
The title is the last line of the rhyme: after ten verses, there are none left. It tells you where the countdown ends before you begin.
The book was not always called this. The first UK title of 1939 was a racial slur taken from a Victorian minstrel song. The island and the rhyme carried the same word. In the United States, Dodd, Mead published it as And Then There Were None from the first edition in 1940. American paperbacks were later titled Ten Little Indians, and for years the setting was Indian Island. British editions kept the old title until 1985. Today every English edition uses the current title, and soldiers have replaced the old word in the rhyme and in the name of the island. That history of the original title is one reason the book is sometimes named as Christie’s most controversial. The other candidate is the Ackroyd novel, for its famous twist (see the similar books below).
Publication History
The novel first ran as a serial in the summer of 1939. It appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in the United States and in the Daily Express in London. The book was first published in London by Collins Crime Club on 6 November 1939. Dodd, Mead followed in New York in January 1940. The Christie estate reports more than 100 million copies sold, which would make it one of the best-selling books of all time. No independent audit backs the figure.
Critical Reception: 1939 and Since
Reviewers were impressed from the start. The Observer called it one of the most bewildering Christies yet. The Times Literary Supplement found little real detection in it but admired the central puzzle. Only a very sharp reader, it said, would guess the answer. The New York Times reviewer thought it the most baffling mystery she had written.
Later critics agreed. Robert Barnard called it probably the best known of her novels. In 1990 it was placed 19th on the Crime Writers’ Association list of the best crime novels. The Mystery Writers of America put it 10th in 1995. In 2015 readers voted it the “World’s Favourite Christie“, ahead of Murder on the Orient Express.
Agatha Christie and Her Hardest Book
Christie began with the idea because it was so difficult. Ten people had to die without the story turning absurd or the killer becoming obvious. In her autobiography Dame Agatha said it was not her favourite, but it was better crafted than anything else she had written. She later adapted it for the stage herself in 1943 and gave the play a different, happier ending. She said this was the play that really started her career as a playwright. The island itself was inspired by Burgh Island, a small tidal island off South Devon with an Art Deco hotel that Christie knew well.
Adaptations: From Christie’s Own Play to the BBC
- 1943: Christie’s stage play, in the West End, with the changed ending
- 1945: René Clair’s Hollywood film, with Barry Fitzgerald and Walter Huston
- 1959: an NBC TV movie in the United States
- 1965, 1974 and 1989: three English-language films, set in an Austrian mountain retreat, an Iranian desert hotel and an African safari
- 1987: a Soviet film by Stanislav Govorukhin, which keeps the novel’s grim ending
- 2005: a West End stage version that also returned to the book’s ending
- 2015: a three-part BBC One series with Aidan Turner, Charles Dance and Maeve Dermody. It was the first English-language screen version to keep the original ending of the novel.
The audiobook is read by Dan Stevens.
Similar Books: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Other Closed-Circle Mysteries
- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926): the other Christie most often named for its ending.
- Murder on the Orient Express (1934): Agatha Christie‘s murder on a train stuck in the snow, with a closed circle of suspects.
- Evil Under the Sun (1941): Poirot at a Devon island hotel, also inspired by Burgh Island.
- The Guest List by Lucy Foley (2020): a wedding on a remote island, cut off by a storm.
- One by One by Ruth Ware (2020): a ski chalet sealed off by an avalanche.
These are all classic mysteries of the trapped-together kind. Do you prefer them gentler, with a village and a sleuth who sets things right? Start with our The Murder at the Vicarage review or browse our British cozy mysteries.
Quick Facts
| Author | Agatha Christie |
|---|---|
| Series | None, a standalone novel |
| First published | 6 November 1939, Collins Crime Club, London |
| US edition | January 1940, Dodd, Mead |
| Setting | Soldier Island, off the coast of Devon |
| Sleuth | None |
| Stage and screen | Christie’s play (1943), films from 1945, BBC series (2015) |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is And Then There Were None a cozy mystery?
No. It is a murder mystery with the pace of a thriller, and it has no detective and no reassuring ending. It belongs on cozy lists as a Golden Age classic, not as a cozy.
Is it a locked-room mystery?
Not quite. It is a closed-circle mystery: an isolated island with a fixed group of suspects, rather than a single sealed room.
Do I need to read other Christie books first?
No. There is no series detective, so And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie stands completely alone. As a first Agatha Christie it works well, and it shows the queen of crime at her most daring.
How long is the book?
It is a short novel of about 250 to 300 pages, depending on the edition.