And Then There Were None is written by Agatha Christie. It was published in 1939 by Collins Crime Club. The book is considered as Christies best book – a masterpiece.
The book is kind of a mix up of a detective story and a since it captured excellently the fearsome thoughts of the characters but also had some brain work for someone who sees theirselves as clever detectives. The horror of the book crept up on me when suddenly started happening ”unnatural”, meaning that the characters’ heads were figuratively speaking falling apart of all the stress from the incidents happening around. The excitement and curiosity of the murderer sustained my interest towards the book.
There are ten main characters, who have never met, seen nor talked to each other but they all have one thing in common: they were responsible for murdering someone, excluding one. They are brang to an isolated, peculiar island called Soldier Island, where they will see the last glances of life. The characters are all from different enviroments and some have trouble coming along.
After they had had their first dinner at the island Mr Rogers, the butler of the island, turned on the gramophone just as his employer had told. The voice from the gramophone told accusations toward every person for being part of a murder, excluding one. After that there started to happen weird events and deaths and within days there were none left.
The book is narrated by an all-knowing outside the story narrator but sometimes also someones in the story pondering different occurenses and characters. The language on the book is fairly simple and easy to follow with a couple of exceptions like old words in example the word ”queer” was used often used as the synonym of the word ”bizarre” so I had to look up a word or few to get the meaning.
At first the book was an extremely dulling experience because I had a bunch preconceptions. But, luckily, the book turned out interesting with its intensity of events and the curiosity of knowing the murderer was bugging me. Reading an English novel didn’t really differ from my experiences of reading a Finnsih novel. Only problem was a few words I wasn’t familiar of. If anyone is a bookworm and haven’t read this I suggest you do.