And Then There Were None Summary: Ten Strangers, One Island, Zero Survivors

The setup

Ten strangers are invited to a private island off the Devon coast by a mysterious host, 'U. N. Owen.' None of them has met their host. When they arrive, he isn't there. Over dinner, a recorded voice accuses each guest of a specific murder that the law could never prove — a child hit by a car, a patient given the wrong injection, an African tribe left to die.

Then, one by one, the guests start dying. Each death matches a line from a nursery rhyme framed in every bedroom: 'Ten little soldier boys went out to dine…' A soldier figurine disappears from the dining table after each death.

The murders

Anthony Marston chokes on cyanide in his whiskey. Mrs. Rogers doesn't wake up. General Macarthur is bludgeoned on the shore. Rogers is killed while chopping wood. Emily Brent is injected with cyanide. Judge Wargrave is apparently shot in the forehead. Dr. Armstrong disappears into the sea. Blore is crushed by a marble clock. Vera Claythorne hangs herself in her bedroom. Philip Lombard is shot on the beach.

When the police arrive days later, they find ten bodies and no possible killer. Everyone on the island is dead. The murders can't have been done by an outsider — a storm cut the island off. And they can't have been done by any of the ten, because every one of them died before the next.

Who is U. N. Owen?

A fisherman later finds a manuscript in a bottle. It's a confession from Judge Wargrave. He was dying of an incurable illness, obsessed since childhood with the theatrical execution of criminals the law couldn't touch. He faked his own death with the help of Dr. Armstrong (who thought he was helping trap the real killer), then killed Armstrong once he was no longer useful, watched the last two guests die in mutual paranoia, and finally shot himself in a way designed to look like one of the earlier murders.

'U. N. Owen' is 'Unknown.' Every guest was chosen because they had genuinely killed someone and gotten away with it.

Why the ending works

Christie sets up an impossibility — every suspect is a corpse — and then solves it cleanly with a mechanism that was in front of you the whole time. The trick isn't the identity of the killer (Wargrave is one of the most senior guests, and gets one of the earliest 'deaths'). The trick is that Christie makes you accept the death because a doctor confirmed it. She hides the murder weapon inside the reader's assumptions.

It also works because the moral question isn't 'who killed them?' It's 'did they deserve it?' Christie leaves you slightly unsettled by the answer.

Was it originally called something else?

Yes — and the original title used a racial slur that has been rightly retired. The book has also been published under Ten Little Indians. All modern editions use And Then There Were None, taken from the rhyme's last line.

Watch the 5-minute summary

Watch the full 5-minute summary of And Then There Were None for the compressed plot and every death in order.