And Then There Were None (ATTWN) features prominently (and for a long time for me, frustratingly) in book lists that I’m always in a look out for it in different bookshops trying to get my hands on a copy. Christie is a prolific writer and in the Crime & Thriller shelf, her books would often take two or three brackets of a shelf — but none of those books is this particular one.
I don’t know what it is, because it seems to be the work that she is most well-known for that doesn’t feature Poirot or Miss Marple. This book just simply did not exist. So when I saw a copy in Kinokuniya, I snatched it and paid in full. Perhaps it is the fact that the book was laced with controversy — that the title was demeaning to certain ethnic minorities, despite the fact that the book has no such minorities.
In all my time reading, I’ve actually never touched an Agatha Christie. She was big in Indonesia when I was growing up that even my grandma read her. Maybe one of my earliest experiences of reading a novel was trying to decipher her novels in Indonesian. But even when I was a kid I felt there was something weird about the tone, that it was too showy, too brash. I remember that feeling even as a mature reader.
Christie writes her prose without embellishments or complications. You can finish her books pretty bloody quickly and breeze through the plot. I like the pacing in ATTWN, and even with the many characters you can quickly gauge their quirks and identify them quickly in your mind. The book has an interesting array of characters who in no way fit with each other: the sombre judge, the secretary who’s trying to prove her merits to her new employers, the heretic old lady, the lackey, the jaded doctor, the two old servant couple, the general, the adonis and the private eye.
All these strangers meet in a private island, each of them not knowing why they were invited there in the first place. As clichéd as it sounds, each of them carry a dark secret (DUN DUN DUNNNNNN) and these secrets will surface in this mysterious island that has no direct connection to the mainland and has no corners to hide. Yet the guests are dropping off one by one. On top of that, the hosts are nowhere to be found.
For a premise of a detective story, ATTWN is suspenseful. We know how the story ends, but it’s not until the final pages that we know (or at least I know) how everything was possible. I still feel the explanation in the epilogue was too unrealistic and too convenient. Christie struggled with this resolution so that the basis of her plot can exist, and it is to be respected. The book is more than serviceable for what it is, but for a book that I have been literally hunting for years and with a reputation of a classic, it fell a bit flat.
