And Then There Were None

"That’s interesting, because it’s one of the most brutal. It’s one of the most bleak stories in this genre. Certainly the original. Most people know it from the stage or film adaptations. Christie wrote the stage version, but was asked to give it a bit more of an upbeat ending, which she grumbled about but did. She wasn’t’ very happy with it. The original ending is just that, well, you know, everybody is dead. Including the ones you really liked. So it is the ultimate in some ways, in that everyone is just wiped out. I think it’s more shocking than most of Christie’s output. Much more than her Poirots or Miss Marples, or her lighter books like the Tommy and Tuppence series. And it’s regularly voted or considered by the public her best work, which is interesting because her most famous work doesn’t feature either of her two most famous detectives, and just features everyone getting horribly bumped off. Yes, literally. They are on this remote island, where there is just nobody there apart from two strange, surly servants. It’s a hellish landscape, really. Or to be more precise, like purgatory. They don’t know what’s going on. They don’t know if they are going to live or die, then, one by one, they realise they are all going to be picked off one by one and they can’t get away. They can’t fight back, because they don’t know where the danger is coming from, who is killing them. It’s quite terrifying. I think the essence of noir or gothic literature is unseen threat. That’s the difference with your basic thriller , like a war thriller. If you know where the danger is, what you’re up again, you can go into battle. Whereas in the gothic, you don’t even know if it’s another human. You just know there’s some threat out there which may or may not kill you soon."

"I think Agatha Christie would have a terrific problem nowadays, not least with Poirot and his genius because you couldn’t gather the six or seven possibly guilty people into one room and give them a lecture and then quiz them. They would just say, ‘Talk to my lawyer’ and walk out. But she could get away with that 50 years ago. The other thing she couldn’t get away with today, and she’d be the first to accept it, is DNA. My dear friend, Gilbert Gray QC, one of the great murder QCs, said it ruined his career. He was halfway through it when DNA arrived. He was getting people off, being paid amazing fees, he was the leading murder barrister in the north of England. Suddenly DNA came along, and he was losing every single case. He brought to my attention that Agatha Christie, dare one say it, died at the right time. She managed to miss DNA. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I have chosen what I think is a masterpiece. Now, there are always the snooties, and there always will be, particularly in this country. There are snobs who don’t like authors who dare to tell stories and don’t like success. Agatha Christie was a brilliant storyteller. She didn’t sell millions of books by mistake. But the best one is And Then There Were None . It’s a wonderful story about a group of people caught on an island, and someone gets murdered. And then someone else gets murdered. And then someone else gets murdered. The numbers are going down and down, and you’re wondering who is murdering all these people. The television version was quite outstanding as well, with Charles Dance playing the lead. He was terrific, I’ve never seen him better. But for those who have wondered where to start with Agatha Christie, this and The ABC Murders are frankly the two best she’s ever done, and if I had to pick just one, I would pick And Then There Were None. Her biographers say she first got the story from a German author and then wrote her version of it. I have no problem with that at all because I suspect her version of it was far superior. But it wasn’t her usual theme, it wasn’t her normal, ‘This is a jolly good read, enjoy Christmas!’ That’s what she was famous for, ‘Have a Christie at Christmas.’ This wasn’t exactly a fun, Christmas stocking book. As I say, it was suggested she originally read the story by not a well-known, but not an unknown German author. I’m hardly one to complain because I attempted to rewrite The Count of Monte Cristo in the form of A Prisoner of Birth . I made it very clear that was the case. So many authors rely on stories and, frankly, the great line that there are only six great stories and all we do is variations on them may indeed have an element of truth."

"It might seem bizarre choosing a crime novel as a ‘feel good’ book but I think there’s something so deeply satisfying about so many Golden Age mysteries in that broadly speaking, the villains get their comeuppance and justice is served, albeit belatedly and after a high body count. Inhabiting a world in which order is eventually restored is high on the feel good factor for me at least! When I write my books, I always have that feel good factor in mind. So yes, my characters might go through tough times and find themselves in difficult situations but it’s important to me that I leave my readers with a sense of hope and the feeling that a better day is coming. Mike Gayle discusses latest book Hope Street at the Fleet Street Quarter Festival of Words, 14-17 May 2025, event and ticket information at fleetstreetquarter.co.uk/festival-of-words"

"There’s a reason that it so often tops the chart of favorite or best Agatha Christie novels of all time, because it’s got everything. It has got a remote location and a strong, menacing atmosphere. It’s got a brilliantly eclectic cast of characters, none of whom are particularly likable in totality. But what’s so brilliant about this novel—and it’s only true of this one and Room —is that it’s actually scary to read. I reread it for this interview, and even though I knew what was going to happen, there were still moments when I had to put it down. I read in the evenings, and I was just too scared to continue reading before bedtime. That is such a feat. We’re used to being scared by the visual, by TV or film, but to be scared by something that somebody has written on the page is just incredible. It does set this novel apart. I can’t think of that many other—even Agatha Christie—novels that I’ve been scared reading, but I was scared even rereading this one. That tension of knowing all of these people have either wittingly or unwittingly done something that makes them culpable for someone else’s demise, but nonetheless hoping they all get off the island, creates such a tension within yourself. You almost don’t know how to feel about these characters. The suspense of who’s going to be next and the uncertainty of whether it’s one of them who is actually committing crimes, or whether someone else has managed to sneak on the island… And then the storm comes in, and they can’t possibly get off. Just that sense of ‘Surely, they’re going to be cut a break at some point?’ It’s a master class in psychological tension. It’s taking the reader on a journey that they don’t really want to go on, but feel compelled to go on, nonetheless. I started off writing what I guess you could call book club fiction. But what I’m really interested in is dysfunctional relationships between people, particularly within families. I get quite annoyed when people are dismissive about fiction that is based in families—men write novels of ideas, and women write small domestic novels. To my mind, the family is where everything begins. For me, the family is absolutely the political because the kind of citizen you are going to become is very likely to be shaped, to a large degree, by the kind of family experiences you have growing up. So in my previous novel, The Forgetting , I leant into a much darker space about dysfunctional relationships between characters. I’ve continued that with Three Mothers . So I’m now writing much more in a domestic suspense space. Three Mothers is about women who are connected by the fact that all their children go to the same private school. In the first chapter, one of the children, Isla, a 17-year-old perfect model student, is killed in a hit-and-run. As her mother, Abby, tries to understand how this has happened, she uncovers quite a lot about both Isla’s life and about her friends and their kids. It’s a novel about both the lengths that parents will go to protect their children and how little we often know about our children’s lives. I finished this book a year ago, and it’s been so interesting watching the response to Adolescence . It’s a phenomenal piece of TV drama and chimes in with those themes. A lot of parents don’t acknowledge how much they don’t know about their children’s lives. I don’t know whether it’s because they don’t want to face up to that reality, or that they simply don’t know that they don’t know. But Adolescence has been a real watershed moment with a lot of parents wondering, ‘What don’t I know about my child’s life?’ Part of the reason that Abby does that is because she believes that her relationship with Isla is about as good as anyone’s relationship with their 17-year-old daughter can be. She absolutely believes that they are open, transparent, and honest with each other. Since her husband died, Abby has been emotionally reliant on her daughter. Her daughter has been the emotional rock at the heart of the family. Abby doesn’t know that there is anything to be hidden, that she could feasibly find out, until after Isla’s death. There is a big twist. All of these novels do, except Room . As a reader, I think there is something very satisfying about a novel with a big twist. Sometimes when you’re reading a book, there is too much misdirection. Waiting to see what the twist will be is slightly annoying because there are so many red herrings. For me, every red herring has to earn its place in the novel. It has to have its own storyline and its own reason for being there, and it needs to relate to character development. I get really annoyed about red herrings that are just in there for their own sake. But for me, both as a reader and particularly as a writer, there is a real pleasure in plotting out the twists. They are true of the tapestry of our lives as well. Lots of different things are happening at the same time that might impact the way we behave or the outcomes that we have. A lot of those will be completely irrelevant and won’t impact us at all. But they are taking place, while this other big juggernaut that is going to alter the course of our lives comes towards us. Room isn’t a red herring novel. It’s a suspense novel. And Then There Were None is the most obvious contender for the possibility of red herrings that you don’t need. But there’s nothing in there that is superfluous. There are Christie novels with red herrings that you think are there purely to misdirect, but I can’t think of any in And Then There Were None because everything does tie together very neatly at the end. If you reread it immediately after having finished it, there wouldn’t be anything that stands out as a glaring, obvious misdirection."

"Yes, I loved Agatha Christie when I was a teenager, and she is one of the reasons I became a mystery thriller writer. I still think that her books have a lot in them that a teenager would enjoy today. The characters in Agatha Christie’s novels are brilliantly drawn and very clever. None of them are ever fully good or bad, they’re all extremely complex and interesting. In And Then There Were None , you’ve got 10 strangers who are invited to stay on an isolated island off the Devon coast, which immediately makes you think bad things are probably going to happen. When they arrive, they all find themselves accused of murder, and they have no idea who is behind all these accusations or what their accuser wants from them. Then, when one of the 10 dies, they realise that someone on the island really is a murderer who is trying to make them pay for their past crimes. It’s a great book because a lot of the conflict comes from the characters turning on each other. They’re all horrible people so they don’t trust anyone else, and then their secrets start being revealed. I love this as a premise. One of the characters who dies near the end of the book at first comes across as the most reasonable, nicest character, but when you find out what they did to end up on the island, you realise that your first impression was completely wrong. They’re hiding something really dark and it reminds you that you can never really tell who anyone is on the inside. Yes. I think this is my favourite book of hers. It has the tightest plotting of all of them, and it’s very clever. You’ve got fake deaths and red herrings thrown in everywhere. You don’t know who the killer is, and it doesn’t even really matter as you’re reading because you’re so invested in learning more about the characters themselves. Yes, the characters are isolated and can’t get away from each other or from their own secrets, so some of them start to lose their minds through guilt. I really like books that deal with guilt as a theme, and whether someone’s personal guilt is a greater punishment than legal recourse. The book is a very interesting character study and there is also an amazing TV miniseries from 2015. Yes, it heavily inspired my book, in which 10 teenagers are blackmailed onto a carnival pier by a guilt-eating monster. There’s a big nod to And Then There Were None in that these 10 teenagers are all horrible characters who end up turning on each other. But that’s where the similarities end as my book also contains a lot of supernatural elements. I like books that have a deeper message. All the books I’ve picked, even though they are a lot of fun on the surface, also deal with issues that actually matter to real teenagers. Benjamin Dean’s books have some brilliant male protagonists, but the other Young Adult books I’ve recommended are narrated by girls. I think part of the reason for this is that a lot of authors writing for teens tend to be women, and I think a lot of us grew up in an era when there weren’t many girls starring in the books we had available to us. I personally went straight from reading children’s books to reading Stephen King and other authors like him, and the women weren’t always represented in a way that resonated with me. Those books didn’t feel like they were about me. So when I started writing, I wrote the books and characters I wished I had been exposed to as a teenager. But I do think there is a big gap in the market for more male characters to be having all of these adventures as well. A few thrillers I’ve enjoyed with boy protagonists include Whiteout by Gabriel Dylan, Wranglestone by Darren Charlton and Secrets Never Die by Vincent Ralph. It’s such a diverse genre, with books for everyone. You’ve got books like Tess Sharpe’s, which can be heavy at times. Sometimes that’s the kind of book I want to read, because it challenges me and makes me cry and changes my perspective on the world. Then there are books like Benjamin Dean’s, which are really humorous and fun but are also hiding a dark side and have an important message. The sort of books I write are all about the escapism. They are fun and often silly and rely heavily on tropes, because lots of people like tropes. I think there’s something for everyone in thrillers for teens."