- Title
- Just a dream: a partial re-solution of Agatha Christie's 'And then there were none': A case of almost, but not quite, getting the job done
- Creator
- Rolls, Alistair
- Relation
- Intercripol: Revue de critique policière Vol. 1, Issue 1, p. 1-6
- Relation
- http://intercripol.org/fr/thematiques/critique-policiere/theywerenone/just-a-dream.html
- Publisher
- Internationale De La Critique Policiere
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- I am conscious as I embark on this attempt to shed new light on Agatha Christie’s classic variant on the locked-room mystery of letting the side down, of failing in the mission entrusted to me by my colleagues at InterCriPol by not quite getting the job done. The challenge set is to restore the balance of justice by finding the truth, by which is meant in this case the “real identity” of the killer. From the outset therefore, the mission is predicated on the innocence of Mr Justice Wargrave, or at least his failure to be guilty, to accomplish the crime of which he is accused, and indeed of which he appears to accuse himself, in And Then There Were None. In my pursuit of justice I find myself doubly straight-jacketed: first, by Christie’s own pride in her accomplishment (“I wrote the book after a tremendous amount of planning, and I was pleased with what I had made of it. It was clear, straightforward, baffling, and yet had a perfectly reasonable explanation; in fact it had to have an epilogue in order to explain it”); and second, by Pierre Bayard’s revelation of a fundamental flaw in Christie’s logic, which is to say, the fact that what makes a locked room of Soldier Island is the sudden – and, crucially, unpredictable – arrival of a storm that prevents those gathered there from leaving. I have found it impossible to reread the book impartially in light of these two ostensibly opposed notions, the one a celebration of perfection and the other of imperfection. And yet, clearly, the perfect crime novel must by necessity be flawed – there must be a loose thread in the carpet, a breach in the locked room. Bayard’s revelation is, of course, rather more than a thread in the carpet, since such threads are built into the weave by the artisans themselves; in this case, the flaw undoes the entire carpet, loose thread and all. Here too, however, we must not be too hasty. After all, it is not impossible that Christie’s solution is itself a bluff. As Mr Justice Wargrave thinks (aloud, as it were), “Solder Island, eh? There’s a fly in the ointment”.
- Subject
- Agatha Christie; epilogues; lock-room mysteries; Pierre Bayard
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1413715
- Identifier
- uon:36664
- Identifier
- ISSN:2725-3236
- Language
- eng
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