For those who are not aware, the premise of And Then There Were None is simple. Ten people are on an island, each having received an invitation they couldn’t possibly refuse. Their host, U. N. Owen, is expected a day or so after their arrival, so they bunk up in the lovely house on Soldier Island; each person finds a framed rendition of the Ten Little Niggers Indians Soldiers nursery rhyme in their room and a sculpture of ten figures as a centrepiece in the dining room. The evening of their arrival, a recording plays addressing each of the guests directly and accusing them of murder:
Anthony Marston, a Vile Body boozing and snorting his way through Daddy’s money, is charged with killing two children while driving recklessly; Mr and Mrs Rogers, the butler and housekeeper, of allowing the death of their former employer to unspecified wasting illness; General Macarthur, the crusty old moustachioed WWI veteran, of knowingly sending another officer on a mission which virtually guaranteed his death; Mrs Brent, a pious spinster, of driving her maid to suicide by turning her out when she became pregnant out of wedlock; Justice Wargrave, a no-nonsense hanging judge, of sending a man to the gallows on weak evidence; Dr Armstrong, a highly-strung physician, of operating on a patient while drunk thereby causing her death; Inspector Blore, former shady policeman with trustworthy facial hair, of knowingly sending a frail (and innocent) young man to prison wherein he shortly died; Captain Lombard, grumpy sexy mercenary, of abandoning an African tribe to starvation; and Vera Claythorne, a former governess and other designated eye candy of the cast, of allowing her charge to drown.
Please note that all physical descriptions pertain to the BBC adaptation portrayals; I cannot speak for any moustaches and/or sexiness in the book or other adaptations. Except in the case of Vera Claythorne, who is always designated eye candy.
With emotions running high, our rag-tag bunch of humans are picked off one by one according to the Ten Little Soldiers nursery rhyme, and each time one is offed, one of the figures in the dining room is also removed. When someone finally decides to check in on the island, they are forced to alert the authorities that there are ten bodies on the island and no, nobody else went to the island other than me when I dropped them off very much alive. Police are stumped until the moment of the denouement, which takes place in the form of a confessional letter found by a fishing boat and delivered to Scotland Yard, which details the whole plot.
The BBC adaptation was made in commemoration of Agatha Christie’s birth 125 years ago, and And Then There Were None was a very fitting choice for such an occasion, what with it being considered something of an urtext of murder-mystery tropes, Christie herself thought it one of her greatest feats of craftsmanship, and of course it doesn’t feature sleuth characters upon whom ITV have dibs. It’s perfect really. I have spent some time doing thorough research, i.e. reading the wikipedia and tvtropes entries; what I have not done of course is read the book itself, despite it now being public domain and being available here. Apologies, I’m still on Jane Eyre (which my mother wants back).
I have touched upon my love of ITV’s Poirot and Marple adaptations, so I was struggling with a distinct lack of colourful flapper fashion and charlestonning. My thought process was along the lines of “I know the basic story of this one is a group of people trapped on an island all suddenly forced to confront old despicable crimes they have desperately attempted to bury deep while they are picked off in gruesome fashion by an unseen menace as they are tortured by both their past horrors and their current peril and isolation causing them to unravel and lose themselves to fear, suspicion and crushing guilt… but does it have so be so dark?” I don’t know what it says about me as a person that I gravitate more to the fare that portrays similarly coldly calculated murder but does so with brighter colours, more cocktails and jazz blaring joyfully from a gramophone.
Much as I suspected, a spool through of my Thorough Research indicates that the BBC adaptation is bloodier and sexier than the book. Much of this can be put down to the medium — for example, the Rogerses, rather than simply withholding their victim’s medication, opted instead for a much less visually ambiguous smothering with a pillow. General Macarthur straight up shot his victim in the back of the head in his own office (I’m sure there were zero awkward questions), and Blore’s crime was rather more face-stampy than its literary counterpart. Then of course there’s the guilt-roasted nightmare sequences, particularly Dr. Armstrong’s, as he relives how he operated unsuccessfully on that woman who seems to have fallen into a vat of jam. Oh, and Lombard and Claythorne fuck in very unambiguous fashion.
The death that confused me slightly was the third from last. The line in the poem is “Three little soldier boys went to the zoo, One got hugged by a bear, and then there were two”, and logistically it just isn’t possible to transport a bear and then convince him to cooperate in your meticulously planned, incredibly convoluted plot to murder ten people, so this one has always been a little more abstract. In the book, the deed is accomplished with a bear-themed clock used in a straightforward bludgeoning fashion. In this adaptation, the killer just stabs the victim while wearing a bear-skin rug, which he then artfully drapes over the corpse. This, I’m afraid, was quite hilarious, as in my brain the bear was saying “Can’t you see I’m trying to tell you I love you?”.
There were also a couple of tantalising glimpses of Bright Young Things hijinks that I love the ITV productions for, and in this story they are swiftly and cruelly subverted. The first is the beautiful air-headed fop casually sniffing cocaine between lines; he is scooped up as victim no. 1 just as he’s getting into the groove of a rant about how irritating it was that he ran over those two children because he lost his license when suddenly, and probably to the relief of everyone in the room, he suffers a violent choking death, which they later ascertain to be a bad amaretto- (or cyanide-)based cocktail. The second being when the guests at Soldier Island have been reduced to less than half their starting number and, rather than sit in silence for another whole evening, they decide to have a substance-fuelled uproarious party. There is indeed much laughing and dancing, but it is of course horrifically manic and desperate, does nothing to detract from their current situation, and is dominated by the doctor suddenly delivering a very graphic and rambling account of his time in service during World War I liberated as he was by the pillars of cocaine lodged up each nostril.
Of significance regarding this adaptation is that, unlike many others, it uses the original ending, barring the absence of the detective Sirs Not-Appearing-In-This-Version-Either, the original recipients of the denouement confession note. Christie adapted the book into a stage play, during which she realised that the ending AND THEY ALL DIED. THE END. wasn’t satisfying for theatre and instead rewrote the ending to have one character realise it was her boyfriend who committed the crime of which she was accused all along and the other that he’s been faking his identity this whole time so he’s innocent too, and they flounce off to get married while the killer concedes the point and sheepishly goes off to fake his own death again. Instead, Vera Claythorne, having shot Lombard in what she believes to be self defence, makes her way back to the house to hang herself from Chekhov’s ceiling hook, which rather obligingly has a noose dangling from it now. Assisted by this mystery convenience and the hallucinations of the child she allowed to drown, she stands on the chair (also provided) and slips on the noose. She is in the process of kicking the chair out from under herself when Judge Wargrave makes an appearance without any unsightly bullet holes in his head and reveals that it was him all along even though he died yesterday. He’s got an impending painful cancer death on the way, and he instead decides that a more noble death is to succumb to his supreme justice hard-on and stage an elaborate murder-suicide plot, selecting his victims from people he knew had committed murder but were beyond the reach of the unwieldy arm of the law. Presumably the advantages of going with the Ten Little Soldiers framework — namely making the group aware that there is most definitely a cat-and-mouse game afoot and keeping them perversely, perpetually reminded that any one of them could be next — must outweigh the inconvenience of having to come up with bear- or bee-themed deaths. He doesn’t really elaborate on that bit..
I prefer the aforementioned Poirot and Marple series for their lighter tone, but those stories are cathartic and optimistic by nature. There are survivors who are each shown to move on to new chapters in their life, able to put the past behind them, and the titular sleuths are shown as being instrumental in bringing them that sympathy, closure and understanding. Of course that is not the case with And Then There Were None, and what the BBC adaptation did was perfectly apt and striking, capturing the unrelenting bleakness of the situation beautifully. If you haven’t seen it, do pay a visit to BBC iPlayer and check it out. Of course I look forward to availing myself of the public-domain book and continuing to be that terrible person who always squawks “BUT THAT’S NOT IN THE BOOK!”.
Nel Norris 