Spinster, the Butler, like pieces set out for a board game. A recorded voice accuses them all of murder and names their victims. One by one, the characters die, the manner of their deaths in keeping with a chilling nursery rhyme. They search for the murderer but there is no one else on the island. The killer is one of them. But which one?
And Then There Were None is many things: the ultimate locked-room mystery; a nerve-shredding psychological thriller; a forensic disquisition on the nature of guilt; a portrait of a psychopath … and despite the flashes of mordant wit, it is terrifying. Ten isolated and paranoid characters, facing a brutal and remorseless reckoning from which there is no possible mitigation, no chance to plead and nowhere to hide. No sleuth will arrive to interpret the clues, apprehend the villain and restore order, and the only thing you can do is try desperately to survive. Cosy is the very last thing it is. It also struck me that this is a novel of its time. Written and published in 1939, as the world was about to be precipitated into another cataclysmic war, the story felt on the very edge of the chaos and slaughter of the Second World War and, simultaneously, shockingly contemporary. It also felt profoundly subversive.
Following And Then There Were None, I was asked to read The Witness for the Prosecution for a two-hour BBC adaptation. It is a story of sex, money, deceit, performance and murder with the most glorious, sleight-of-hand twist. It has all the elements of classic Noir – murky motives, an enigmatic femme fatale and a seemingly decent man drawn deep into the web. It is set (as are many of the stories in this collection) in the deeply divided 1920s, an era of giddy hedonistic excess, champagne, shingled hair, the sizzle and thrill of jazz for some but grinding penury and want for most. It’s a world of grimy boarding houses, dank streets thick with chill fog, flickering gaslights and the cold clear light of the courtroom. The shadow of the First World War, with its seismic upheavals, ruptured certainties, scars and horrors, looms darkly. In the TV adaptation Leonard Vole, the penniless young man accused of seducing and manipulating the wealthy, indulgent Emily French into making her will in his favour, and then murdering her, tells his pedantic solicitor John Mayhew* that he hadn’t been able to ‘settle to anything, not since service’. This detail thrums with battle trauma. Romaine, a Viennese actress and the only person who can speak in Vole’s defence, is considered to have got her ‘hooks’ into Vole to get herself out of the scorched ruins of Europe. She is a ‘dangerous woman’, thinks Mayhew, ‘very dangerous.’ He has no idea.
The story is rife with the bat-squeaks of transgression. The relationship between Emily French and Leonard Vole that Vole describes as motherly could equally be perceived as sexual. Janet the maid is described as so consumed with loathing and jealousy that you wonder at the dynamic of the household that Vole becomes a part of. Even Mayhew, with his dry little cough and his pince-nez and his adherence to ‘normal procedure’, isn’t immune to transgression. He is fascinated by Romaine to the point of obsession. His stuffy legal language is abandoned for eroticism during her very public humiliation; her ‘exquisite body’, how she flames and flaunts herself ‘like a tropical flower’. You can’t help but feel how much he’s enjoying watching Romaine break while the rest of the court judges her. The scarlet woman – not so dangerous now. The twist, when it comes, explodes like a bomb. The law is flawed. Justice is entirely fallible, driven by emotion, and emotions are easily manipulated. It’s not the truth that matters, Christie seems to suggest, but performance. Performance is everything.
Running throughout Christie’s work is the theme of performance, and the identities people inhabit to hide their true selves and their motives. The characters in And Then There Were None look at each other, the familiar archetypes, and wonder with horror who they really are and what they are capable of, now that they see behind the facade of wealth, sex, faith and status. The same is true of the characters in these short stories. All human interactions, between men and women, between parents and children, between old friends, are loaded with menace. ‘Philomel Cottage’, the idyllic home of passionate newlyweds, slowly turns into Bluebeard’s Castle with a young wife living in fear of her new husband. The forceful bonhomie of the family atmosphere in ‘S.O.S.’ is taut with threat. Ordinary objects and daily rituals shimmer with malevolence. Goodness and human decency are no protection, rather they mark you out as vulnerable and easy prey. In one of the cruellest stories, ‘The Mystery of the Blue Jar’, a cheerful young man and avid golfer spirals into madness and hallucination because he believes he has heard a woman’s helpless scream of ‘Murder!’ He meets people whom he trusts to help him and who instead are the architects of his despair and dislocation. In ‘The Red Signal’ one of the characters observes that ‘the man […] or woman who is to all appearance perfectly normal may be in reality a poignant source of danger to the community.’ In other words, trust no one. Not a single soul. You do not know who anyone really is.
‘Perfectly normal.’ Your neighbours. The people you see every day. Your family. The woman sitting next to you on the train. They look like you. They talk like you. They pass. They fit in but they could change at any moment and you don’t know when. And they are sizing you up to see what they can gain and how they’re going to get away with it.
What I find astonishing about this is the pervasive queasy tensions, the paranoia and simmering violence. Yes, as murder mysteries they should be tense and have the edge of violence, but there’s something else going on here too. All writers absorb the preoccupations of their times, we can’t help it, and what gives Christie’s best novels and stories their contemporary urgency for me is the way she takes the pulse of her times and finds it thready, anxious and febrile. Englishness itself is being dissected. The old certainties are crumbling. The status quo is not restored, everything is not going to be alright in The End. Faith, the law, status, privilege and profession are thin disguises and they are no protection against smiling predators, spilled blood and lives lost. We are all capable of terrible things. Danger is everywhere. You do not know who anyone truly is, if the cocktail they’re handing you is safe to drink, if the candlestick they’re polishing could be used as a weapon, if they will consider your life a fair trade-off for their ambition … You just do not know. So trust no one. Not even yourself …
Because the predator might even be you.
SARAH PHELPS
2016
The Witness for the Prosecution
Mr Mayherne adjusted his pince-nez and cleared his throat with a little dry-as-dust cough that was wholly typical of him. Then he looked again at the man opposite him, the man charged with wilful murder.
Mr Mayherne was a small man precise in manner, neatly, not to say foppishly dressed, with a pair of very shrewd and piercing grey eyes. By no means a fool. Indeed, as a solicitor, Mr Mayherne’s reputation stood very high. His voice, when he spoke to his client, was dry but not unsympathetic.
‘I must impress upon you again that you are in very grave danger, and that the utmost frankness is necessary.’
Leonard Vole, who had been staring in a dazed fashion at the blank wall in front of him, transferred his glance to the solicitor.
‘I know,’ he said hopelessly. ‘You keep telling me so. But I can’t seem to realize yet that I’m charged with murder—murder. And such a dastardly crime too.’
Mr Mayherne was practical, not emotional. He coughed again, took off his pince-nez, polished them carefully, and replaced them on his nose. Then he said:
‘Yes, yes, yes. Now, my dear Mr Vole, we’re going to make a determined effort to get you off—and we shall succeed—we shall succeed. But I must have all the facts. I must know just how damaging the case against you is likely to be. Then we can fix upon the best line of defence.’
Still
