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| Plot summary
Eight people of different social classes have been invited to go to a mansion on Soldier Island (or Nigger Island in the original version), which in reality is based upon Burgh Island off the coast of Devon[6], by a Mr. and Mrs. U.N. Owen. Upon arriving, they are told by the butler and his wife, Thomas and Ethel Rogers, that their hosts are currently away. Each guest finds in his or her room a slightly odd bit of bric-a-brac and a framed copy of the nursery rhyme "Ten Little Soldiers" ("Ten Little Niggers" in the original 1939 UK publication and "Ten Little Indians" in the 1940 US publication) hanging on the wall.
During a large dinner, the guests notice ten soldier figurines on the dining room table. Later, while they are having dinner, a gramophone record plays, informing the ten that each is guilty of murder. All of the guests acknowledge their awareness of and, in some cases, involvement in the deaths of the persons mentioned, while denying any malice or legal culpability.
The guests realize they have all been tricked into coming to the island, but cannot get back to the mainland, as the boat which had regularly delivered supplies has stopped arriving. They are then murdered, one by one, with each murder paralleling a verse of the nursery rhyme, and one of the ten soldier figurines being removed after each murder.
First to die is Anthony Marston, whose drink is poisoned with cyanide (one choked his little self). That night, Thomas Rogers notices that one soldier figurine is missing from the dining table. The next morning, Mrs. Rogers never wakes up, and is assumed to have received a fatal overdose of sleeping draught (one overslept himself). At lunchtime, MacArthur, who had predicted that he would never leave the island alive, is found dead from a blow to the back of his head when Dr. Armstrong calls him to lunch (one said he'd stay there). In growing panic, the survivors search the island for the murderer or possible hiding places, but find no one. Justice Wargrave establishes himself as a decisive leader of the group; he asserts that one of them must be the murderer and is playing a sadistic game with them. An example of the killer's twisted humor is that—with the exception of Wargrave and Marston—each of the "guests" has been invited to come to the Island by Mr. and Mrs. "U.N.Owen" (a pun on "UNknOWN").
The next morning, Rogers is missing, and they notice one of the little soldier figurines is missing as well. Rogers is soon found dead in the woodshed, having been struck in the head with a large axe (one chopped himself in halves). Later that day, while the others are in the drawing room, Emily Brent stays in the dining room and she dies from an injection of potassium cyanide—the injection mark on her neck is an allusion to a bee sting (a bumblebee stung one). The hypodermic needle is found outside, thrown from the window along with a smashed china soldier figurine. The five survivors—Dr. Armstrong, Justice Wargrave, Philip Lombard, Vera Claythorne, and Ex-Inspector Blore—become increasingly frightened. Wargrave announces that anything on the island that could be used as a weapon should be locked up, including Wargrave's sleeping pills and Armstrong's medical equipment; Lombard admits to bringing a revolver to the island, but it has gone missing. They decide to sit in the drawing room, with only one leaving at any one time—theoretically, they should all be safe that way. Vera goes up to her room and discovers a strand of seaweed planted there; her screams attract the attention of Blore, Lombard, and Armstrong, who rush to her aid. When they return to the drawing room, they find Wargrave, dressed up in a judge's wig and gown, slumped against a chair with a gunshot wound in his forehead (one got into Chancery); Armstrong confirms his death.
That night, Blore hears someone sneaking out of the house. He and Lombard search the remaining rooms and discover Armstrong missing from his room—so they think he must be the killer. Vera, Blore, and Lombard, whose revolver has since been returned to him, decide it best to go outside when morning arrives; when Blore's hunger makes him go back into the house, he does not return; as Vera and Phillip search for him, they discover his body on the front lawn, his head crushed by Vera's marble, bear-shaped clock (a big bear hugged one). They assume that Armstrong has committed the murder and leave to walk along the shore. They find Armstrong's drowned body along the cliffs (a red herring swallowed one) and realize that they are the only two left; though neither could possibly have killed the Inspector, their mutual suspicion has driven them to the breaking point and each of them assumes the other to be the murderer. As they lift Armstrong's body out of reach of the water, Vera swipes Lombard's revolver, kills him on the beach (out in the sun; or, one shot the other), and returns to her room (momentarily thinking the last rhyme of the poem was 'Got married and then there was none' because of her need for Hugo. Ironically, that is a version of the last line of the poem), discovering a noose hanging from the ceiling and a chair underneath it. Having finally been driven mad (or "hypnotically suggestible") by the experience, Vera hangs herself, kicking the chair out from under her, fulfilling the final verse of the rhyme (hanged himself and then there were none).[8]
[edit] Epilogue
The epilogue consists of a conversation between Inspector Maine, in charge of the unsolved case, and the Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard. The man who made all the arrangements for U.N. Owen's purchase of the island was Isaac Morris, a shady dealer known to efficiently cover his tracks when doing business. However, he cannot tell the police anything; he died of a drug overdose the day the party set sail. During the period when the killings took place and immediately after, no one could have got on or off the island due to poor weather, ruling out the possibility that "Mr. Owen" was some unidentified person who committed the murders while evading detection from the guests.
The police have concluded from the forensic evidence and various characters' diaries that Blore, Armstrong, Lombard, and Vera were definitely the last to die. Blore could not have died last, as the clock was dropped onto him from above, and he could not have set up a way for it to fall on him. Armstrong could not have been last since his body was dragged above the high-tide mark by someone else, nor could Lombard, since he was shot on the beach but the revolver was found upstairs in the hallway, outside the door of Wargrave's room. This leaves Vera, whose fingerprints are on the pistol, and from whose window the clock was dropped on Blore; however, the chair which she kicked away with the noose around her neck was found pushed against the wall, out of reach from where she would have had to stand on it.
In the end, although one of the guests must have been the killer, none of them could have been, leaving the two inspectors baffled. Oddly no notice is taken of the rhyming clue which is in each guest's bedroom
[edit] Postscript
A fishing trawler, the Emma Jane, finds a letter in a bottle floating just off the Devon coast, and sends it to Scotland Yard, who recognise it as a confession by the late Justice Wargrave. In this narrative, Wargrave reveals that he has suffered from a certain sadistic temperament ever since childhood, when he performed torturous experiments on garden pests, a symptom of sociopathy. However, this quality was juxtaposed uneasily with an innate sense of justice; he considered it abhorrent that any innocent person should die by his hand. Thus he became a judge, ordering the death penalty in all cases where he firmly believed the accused person guilty, so that he could enjoy seeing them crippled with fear by the knowledge of their impending death. Unsatisfied, Wargrave always felt a deep desire to commit a murder by his own hand. After discovering that he was terminally ill, he decided to do just that by renting an island off the Devon coast and luring nine people there, all of whom have caused death and escaped justice. He then killed them one by one, reveling in the mental torture each survivor experienced as their own fate approached. In the letter, Wargrave also claims that his extensive experience as a judge rendered him capable of confirming their guilt by observing their reactions to the murders, and that he did indeed intuit the guilt of all of the victims.
Having disposed of the first five guests in the manner above, Wargrave persuaded Armstrong to help him fake Wargrave's own murder, under the pretext that it would rattle the "real murderer." Later, upon meeting Armstrong on the cliff in the middle of night, Wargrave pushed the doctor into the sea, enabling him to orchestrate the rest of the killings without suspicion. The final victim, Vera, hanged herself while Wargrave secretly watched from the bedroom closet. Afterwards, Wargrave pushed the chair against the wall. He then wrote out his confession, putting the letter in a bottle and casting the bottle into the sea.
Wargrave finishes his confession by stating that he plans to shoot himself, but he craves posthumous recognition of his brilliant scheme. He argues that even if his letter is not found, three clues exist that should point to him as the killer:
1. Wargrave was the only guest who did not wrongfully cause the death of anyone before coming to the island. Edward Seton (the man whom the gramaphone accused Wargrave of killing by giving the jury a biased summation in his case) was indeed guilty (this fact is revealed in the investigation); thus paradoxally the one non-murderer of the guests-is the murderer!
2. The "red herring" line in the poem suggests that Armstrong was tricked into his death, and the respectable Justice Wargrave is the only one of the remaining houseguests in whom Armstrong would have been likely to confide.
3. After he shoots himself, the bullet will leave a red mark in his forehead similar to the mark of Cain, the first murderer described in the Biblical Old Testament.
Wargrave then describes how he plans to shoot himself: he will loop an elastic cord through the gun and tie one end of the cord to his eyeglasses. The other end he will loop around the doorknob of an open door. Wargrave will then sit on the bed so that, after shooting himself, his body will seem as if he had been lying there. After shooting himself with a handkerchief wrapped round the gun to avoid fingerprints, the recoil will snap the gun towards the doorknob. The gun will strike the doorknob, detaching the elastic, which will snap back (closing the door in the process) and lie dangling innocuously from his eyeglasses. The gun will be found in the corridor outside the closed door, and a dead body on the bed.
Thus the police will find ten dead bodies and an unsolvable mystery on Soldier Island.
Characters
The following details of the characters are based on the original novel. Stage and film adaptations have often varied with names and backgrounds, such as Judge Wargrave being renamed Cannon and Lombard accused of causing the death of his pregnant girlfriend.
"The Ten Little Soldiers"
* Anthony James Marston, a good-looking man with a well-proportioned body, crisp hair, tanned face and blue eyes. He was born to a wealthy family. He ran over and killed two youths, feeling no remorse for the incident as he lacks any kind of moral responsibility.
* Mrs. Ethel Rogers, the cook and Mr. Rogers's wife. She is described as a pale-faced, ghostlike woman with shifty light eyes, who is scared easily. Despite her respectability and efficiency, she helped her domineering husband, Thomas, to kill an elderly employer of theirs by withholding her medicine, in order to inherit her money.
* General John Gordon Macarthur, a retired World War I hero, who sent his wife's lover, Arthur Richmond (also a soldier), to his death by assigning him to a "suicide" mission.
* Mr. Thomas Rogers, the butler and Mrs. Rogers's husband. One of the first people to come to the island, he is a very hard worker even in his old age. He killed an elderly employer with the help of his wife by withholding restorative drugs from her, in order to inherit her money..
* Emily Caroline Brent, an elderly woman of unyielding principles who uses the Christian Bible to justify her inability to show compassion or understanding for others. She dismissed her pregnant maid, Beatrice Taylor, who later threw herself into a river and drowned. Despite this she feels no guilt.
* Justice Lawrence Wargrave, a retired judge, well known for liberally handing out the death penalty. He is accused of murder due to the judicial hanging of criminal Edward Seton, even though there were some doubts about his guilt at the time of the trial.
* Dr. Edward George Armstrong, a Harley Street surgeon, blamed for the death of patient while operating under the influence of alcohol.
* William Henry Blore, a retired police inspector and now a private investigator, is accused of having had an innocent man, James Landor, sentenced to lifetime imprisonment as a scapegoat after having been bribed. The man later died in the prison.
* Philip Lombard, a soldier of fortune. Literally down to his last square meal, he comes to the island with a loaded revolver. Though he is reputed to be a good man in a tight spot, Lombard is accused of causing the deaths of a native African tribe. It is said that he stole food from the tribe, thus causing their starvation and subsequent death.
* Vera Elizabeth Claythorne, a young teacher, secretary, and ex-governess, who takes mostly secretarial jobs since her last job as a governess ended in the death of her charge. She let young Cyril Hamilton swim out to sea and drown so that his uncle, Hugo Hamilton, could inherit his money and marry her; however, the plan backfired, as Hamilton abandoned her when he realized what she had done. Of all the "guests" Vera is the one most tormented by latent guilt for her crime..
Other Characters
* Sir Thomas Legge and Inspector Maine, two policemen who discuss the case in the epilogue.
* Isaac Morris, the short Jew who is hired by Mr. Owen and arranges for Phillip Lombard to come to the island and meet Mr Owen for a later payment of 100 Guineas {105 GBP} to Lombard. Isaac Morris, as mentioned in the post script of the book, dies when he takes what is thought to be a pill to help him with his "gastrial juices" given to him by Mr. Owen.
* Fred Narracott, the boatman who delivered the guests to the island. After doing so he doesn't appear again.
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