And Then There Were None~Agatha Christie

***Very mild spoilers ahead***


If you want to give Agatha Christie a go, then this book is a great one to try - I'd certainly put it in her top 5, and given it's apparently one of the best-selling books of all time, lots of people agree with me! (As a side note, I might be stricter with some authors, but as Christie wrote 66 detective novels over the course of her career, I'm giving myself a whole top five rather than just one favourite!)

The really impressive thing about this story is that it takes the familiar form of the locked room mystery and pares absolutely everything down to the bone in only 272 tension-filled pages. Once all the characters are stuck in the proverbial room - in this case, an island that's immediately made inaccessible by bad weather - they start dying with alarming rapidity and nobody, least of all the reader, can figure out who is doing it or why...

The characters, as is usual with Christie, are well-drawn, with a lot of the early interest and tension coming from the interaction of people from different backgrounds, temperants, and, of course, different things that they're anxious to keep hidden. This starts with their introductions and reasons for coming down to the island, all so very human - with more than one gladly accepting the invitation to a free holiday even though they can't quite remember meeting their host, and others accepting an offer of employment even though the circumstances are out of the ordinary.

The really standout aspect of the book, though, is the atmosphere of tension that starts building as soon as everyone arrives on the island, climbs as they start searching the island for clues or anything that could help them out of their desperate situation, and ratchets up to almost unbearable levels as suspiscion spreads like a disease and number of people left alive shrinks to (almost!) unbelievable levels...

This locked room mystery departs from the standard tropes towards the end: there's no detective coming to save the day and separate the guilty from the innocent, no cosy living room where the everyone gathers round and hears the satisfying way that everything works out and how the slips and character flaws of the criminal led to their eventual detection and downfall. Christie eschews this in favour of an ending that is still ingenious, still keeps the reader guessing until the very last page, and is an ultimately powerful, bleak and uncompromising denouement.

I'm probably on track to finish my Agatha Christie readathon by about 2025 (as I do read other stuff in-between!) I'm sure when I look back this will still end up as one of my top five!