First, there were ten - a curious assortment of strangers summoned as weekend guests to a private island off the coast of Devon. Their host, an eccentric millionaire unknown to all of them, is nowhere to be found. All that the guests have in common is a wicked past they're unwilling to reveal - and a secret that will seal their fate. For each has been marked for murder. One by one they fall prey. Before the weekend is out, there will be none. And only the dead are above suspicion...

1. Who is telling the story of And Then There Were None? What effect did the tone, voice, or language employed by the narrator have on you (i.e., it was frightening)? Explain.
2. What is a motive? (Distinguish between the words motive and motivation.) What motives, if any, did each of the ten guests have for committing these horrible murders?
3. Did you “see it coming”? If not, before you read the “Manuscript Document,” what did you think explained the murders? If you were asked to rewrite the story’s conclusion, which character would you make the murderer and what would see as his/her motive?
4. Which one of the killings depicted in the novel seemed especially accurate or believable to you, and which one seemed especially incredible or fantastic? How would you rewrite the former murder so that it is less realistic, or the latter so that it is less farfetched?
5. Discuss the depiction of group psychology in this novel. Are there any scenes where events or ideas are altered or influenced by how the characters interact with one another? Also, does the dynamic of group psychology in this novel strike you as realistic, frenzied, contrived, simplified, or otherwise?
6. Think a bit more about how this story is told, especially its remarkable plot. What are the inherent problems a storyteller might encounter in killing off all of his or her main characters one by one? And what are the problems an author might face in basing his or her plot on a familiar nursery rhyme? How does Christie successfully avoid these problems, or if you think she fails, how so?
7. Were there moments when you as a reader thought the characters were acting in ways such as you yourself would have acted? If so, explain.
If not, how and why would you have behaved differently?
8. Though there isn’t a real “main character,” Vera Claythorne is one of the more fully developed ones (if only because she lives longer). What do you think of the way that she dies and do you think it is consistent with her character up until that point?
9. The effect of guilt emerges as one of the major underlying themes in the book. Based on your own experience, how accurately does Christie portray the different human responses?
10. Talk about the idea of “justice” in the mystery. Did people “get what they deserved,” or were any of the characters punished unfairly? Does “just behavior” (i.e., Warfield punishing the others for their prior actions) mean that you are a “good” person? Why or why not?

CHRISTIE ON WRITING
Agatha Christie said that she never knew where the ideas for a new novel would spring from: “Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop… suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head.”

She made endless notes in dozens of notebooks, jotting down erratic ideas and potential plots and characters as they came to her: “I usually have about half a dozen [notebooks] on hand and I used to make notes in them of ideas that struck me, or about some poison or drug, or a clever little bit of swindling that I had read about in the paper.”

She spent the majority of time with each book working out all the plot details and clues in her head before she actually put pen to paper. Her son-in-law Anthony Hicks once said: “You never saw her writing.” She never “shut herself away, like other writers do.”

INFLUENCES
Agatha Christie wrote about the world she knew and saw, drawing on the military gents, lords and ladies, spinsters, widows, and doctors of her family’s circle of friends and acquaintances. She was a natural observer and her descriptions of village politics, local rivalries, and family jealousies are often painfully accurate. Her grandson, Mathew Prichard, described her as a: “Person who listened more than she talked, who saw more than she was seen.”

It was often the most everyday events and casual observations that triggered a new plot. Her second book The Secret Adversary stemmed from a conversation overheard in a tea shop: “Two people were talking at a table nearby, discussing somebody called Jane Fish . . . That, I thought, would make a good beginning to a story—a name overheard at a tea shop—an unusual name, so that whoever heard it remembered it. A name like Jane Fish, or perhaps Jane Finn would be even better.”

Her next book Murder on the Links was prompted by a newspaper article about a suspicious murder in France and a theater trip to see the actress Ruth Draper gave her the idea for another clever plot twist: “I thought how clever she was and how good her impersonations were . . . Thinking about her led me to the book Lord Edgware Dies.”

Her grandson also described how a trip to Wales and a local myth spawned another excellent murder mystery. His Granny Nora warned the family about a notoriously dangerous local stretch of road: “ ‘the gypsies cursed that corner years ago when old Harbour turned them off the land.’ Thus did [Agatha Christie] have the legend of Gypsy’s Acre, on which the book Endless Night was based.”

Her notebooks make fascinating reading and the seeds for several stories are easily identified. In 1963 her notebook held details of a plot in development: “West Indian book—Miss M? Poirot . . . B & E apparently devoted—actually B and G (Georgina) had affair for years . . . old ‘frog’ Major knows—has seen him before—he is killed.”

A Caribbean Mystery was published in 1964 with the ‘Old Frog’ as the mystery’s first victim. The Caribbean island is beautifully described and was probably based on St. Lucia, an island that Agatha Christie had visited on holiday.

No prizes for guessing which title started as the notebook entry: “Miss M, train coming from London to Reading? Man strangles a woman. The train was? 3.55, 3.19.” Of course we now know it was the 4:50 From Paddington but many of the hundreds of plots, counterplots and suspects from her fertile imagination never actually made it into print and as Agatha Christie said: “Nothing turns out quite in the way that you thought it would when you are sketching out notes for the first chapter, or walking about muttering to yourself and seeing a story unroll.”

CHRISTIE ON "And Then There Were None"
And Then There Were None is one of the most carefully planned of Christie’s mysteries; she herself considered the plot “near-impossible.”

“It was so difficult to do that the idea had fascinated me...I wrote the book after a tremendous amount of planning, and I was pleased with what I had made of it.”—Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, 1977.

The rhyme comes from a Victorian music hall show song written by Frank Green in 1869, an adaptation in itself of the American comic song, Ten Little Indians, written by Septimus Winner, published in 1868.

© 2006 Agatha Christie Ltd, A Chorion Company. All rights reserved.

1. Who is telling the story of And Then There Were None? What effect did the tone, voice, or language employed by the narrator have on you (i.e., it was frightening)? Explain.
2. What is a motive? (Distinguish between the words motive and motivation.) What motives, if any, did each of the ten guests have for committing these horrible murders?
3. Did you “see it coming”? If not, before you read the “Manuscript Document,” what did you think explained the murders? If you were asked to rewrite the story’s conclusion, which character would you make the murderer and what would see as his/her motive?
4. Which one of the killings depicted in the novel seemed especially accurate or believable to you, and which one seemed especially incredible or fantastic? How would you rewrite the former murder so that it is less realistic, or the latter so that it is less farfetched?
5. Discuss the depiction of group psychology in this novel. Are there any scenes where events or ideas are altered or influenced by how the characters interact with one another? Also, does the dynamic of group psychology in this novel strike you as realistic, frenzied, contrived, simplified, or otherwise?
6. Think a bit more about how this story is told, especially its remarkable plot. What are the inherent problems a storyteller might encounter in killing off all of his or her main characters one by one? And what are the problems an author might face in basing his or her plot on a familiar nursery rhyme? How does Christie successfully avoid these problems, or if you think she fails, how so?
7. Were there moments when you as a reader thought the characters were acting in ways such as you yourself would have acted? If so, explain.
If not, how and why would you have behaved differently?
8. Though there isn’t a real “main character,” Vera Claythorne is one of the more fully developed ones (if only because she lives longer). What do you think of the way that she dies and do you think it is consistent with her character up until that point?
9. The effect of guilt emerges as one of the major underlying themes in the book. Based on your own experience, how accurately does Christie portray the different human responses?
10. Talk about the idea of “justice” in the mystery. Did people “get what they deserved,” or were any of the characters punished unfairly? Does “just behavior” (i.e., Warfield punishing the others for their prior actions) mean that you are a “good” person? Why or why not?