It’s been a long time since the heyday of the great ensemble detective story. The last such production may be 2001’s Gosford Park: less a mystery than a meditation on the class system. Sherlock Holmes’s 21st-century metrosexual alter ego disdains mystery for melodrama, substance for style. Murder has left the drawing room for the crowded, violent thoroughfare; instead of intelligent puzzles we receive grim and obvious murder plots more interested in the violent act than its cause.
Hopefully, the BBC’s recent, lavish adaptation of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None marks a return of intelligent detective fiction to mainstream culture. On the one hand, it was definitely a traditional mystery, being the Queen of Crime’s most famous book. But it has been updated successfully, broadening and deepening incipient themes—a successful marriage of puzzle mystery conventions with darker modern sensibilities.
On a technical level, the production is undeniably impressive. Filmed with drones that give it a sweeping, cinematic aspect, it boasts a cast jam-packed with British acting royalty: most notably Charles Dance (Game of Thrones) as the dignified Judge Wargrave, Aidan Turner (The Hobbit) as cynical Irishman Philip Lombard, Miranda Richardson (Harry Potter) as Emily Brent, and Sam Neill (Jurassic Park) as General John MacArthur. Burn Gorman, Anna Maxwell Martin, Noah Taylor, Douglas Booth, Maeve Dermody, and Toby Stephens fill out the ensemble. Masterful character actors all, they’re a joy to watch.
As for plot, it’s nothing groundbreaking, but remains as powerful in its simplicity as it ever was. With twists and turns and double bluffs, it’s a completely engrossing mystery. Ten people are invited to a party on an island. Ferried across the storm-tossed waves, they climb one by one to the mansion on the hill, establishing character by brief snippets of conversation. The bluff general. The effete dandy. The religious spinster. Fast-forward to dinner, and it becomes apparent that no one knows their host personally. Odd. But no matter, at least the food’s good.
When the first guest drops dead, there is a tendency to think they really should have seen this coming: After all, a tangible sense of dread permeates the island. The shadowed halls, the tempestuous sea and stormy sky, the ghosts of guilt haunting the victims—it all builds to a nerve-wracking, claustrophobic atmosphere. After the second death, the characters start to piece it together.
This inevitability lends the proceedings the urgency and paranoia of a psychological thriller. Usually, the detective has the privilege of investigating the crime after it’s over, from a position of safety; but every person on Soldier Island is a crime scene waiting to happen. “We’re being hunted,” whispers Philip Lombard. This isn’t a murder mystery; it’s a horror film.
However, this is horror from a place of morality. Despite the apparent randomness of death by rhyme, these murders are anything but arbitrary. Early on, a sonorous recording echoes throughout the house, listing the sins for which each person is being punished. Each of them has a death on their conscience. The neglectful babysitter. The abusive policeman. The reckless doctor.
Cleverly, the story is presented to us by way of charismatic bright young things: We don’t want them to die, and by default, they have the audience’s sympathy. As the story progresses, and we learn the circumstances and motivations of their crimes, the characters are stripped of comforting justifications. We begin to understand that behind all their excuses lurks nothing but selfishness. Some are without shame. Others bury the truth under an orgy of sensuality and self-indulgence. Still others make their peace with it. They are, in microcosm, the story of humanity reacting to the reality of death.
This darkness is tempered by an overarching sadness. The series’ most touching moment is bloodless and gentle, yet devastating, as a character who is perhaps the least sympathetic to modern eyes finally understands his guilt. The tragedy is that this is truth without repentance, guilt without possibility of expiation.
Agatha Christie has an unfair reputation as a cozy novelist. In fact, she was very realistic about human frailty. Her stories bring violence to the center of ordinary life and show even the most respectable of people committing unspeakable crimes. Many adaptations of And Then There Were None attempt to soften its essential tragedy, offering up a happy, crowd-pleasing ending. This one, by focusing on the cost of death, on the weight of taking human life, may be more true to Dame Agatha’s spirit than any campy Miss Marple flick and yet more moral than the brutal pulp fiction served up daily on our screens.
Hannah Long is a writer in Rural Retreat, Virginia.
