And Then There Were None recap

Ten strangers are each tricked into visiting an isolated mansion on Soldier Island, where their absent host, the untraceable "U. N. Owen," is never seen. On the first night a recording accuses every one of them of having caused a death and escaped justice. One by one the guests then die, each killing echoing a nursery rhyme about ten soldier boys, and small soldier figurines vanish with every death. Cut off by a storm, the survivors realize the murderer must be among them, but they cannot identify who, and even the calm retired judge Wargrave is found apparently dead. In the end all ten perish; the last survivor, Vera Claythorne, wracked by guilt, hangs herself. Police find the island strewn with bodies and no killer, an impossible crime. A confession later recovered in a bottle reveals the truth: Justice Wargrave, terminally ill and driven to punish the guilty and stage a perfect murder, orchestrated everything, faked his own death with the doctor's unwitting help, killed the rest, and finally took his own life to leave the case unsolvable.

Ten strangers are each lured, by letters and arrangements playing on their circumstances, to an isolated mansion on Soldier Island off the English coast. Among them are a retired judge, Lawrence Wargrave; a young secretary, Vera Claythorne; a soldier of fortune, Philip Lombard; a doctor, a former policeman, an elderly general, a devout spinster, and a reckless young playboy; along with a married couple, the Rogerses, hired to run the house. Their host, a mysterious Mr. or Mrs. U. N. Owen, is nowhere to be found. On the first evening, after dinner, a gramophone recording suddenly fills the room, coldly accusing each of the ten by name of having caused another person's death and gotten away with it. The unsettled guests deny or explain away the charges, and they work out that the untraceable "U. N. Owen" reads like "Unknown": their host is a stranger to every one of them. Then the careless young Anthony Marston chokes and dies after a poisoned drink, the first of the ten, and the group begins to grasp that something deliberate and deadly is at work on the island they cannot leave.

The morning after Marston's death, Mrs. Rogers, the frightened housekeeper, fails to wake: she has died in her sleep. The guests notice that the deaths are following an old nursery rhyme about ten little soldiers, framed and hung in every bedroom, in which the figures die off one by one, and that a set of ten small soldier figurines on the dining table is dwindling, one vanishing with each death. The boat that services the island fails to arrive, and a rising storm cuts them off from the mainland. Old General Macarthur, weighed down by his past, drifts into a strange, resigned calm, telling the others that none of them will ever leave the island; he is soon found dead by the shore, struck from behind. A thorough search of the small island and the house turns up no hiding place and no stranger. The survivors are forced to a terrifying conclusion: no outsider is concealed on Soldier Island, and the murderer must be one of them. Suspicion and dread spread through the house as each person begins to watch the others, and the comfortable assumption that they can simply wait out the weekend collapses into a fight to stay alive.

Trapped and increasingly frantic, the dwindling group tries to reason out who among them is killing the rest, but every theory founders. Justice Wargrave takes charge of their deliberations, presiding like a judge in court and insisting that no one can be ruled out. The deaths keep pace with the rhyme: the butler Rogers fails to appear one morning and is found in the washhouse, killed with an axe while chopping firewood, and soon afterward the self-righteous Emily Brent is found dead in the dining room, killed by an injection after being left there alone. Lombard's revolver, the only firearm on the island, has gone missing, deepening the mutual mistrust; searches of rooms and belongings settle nothing. Each remaining guest is convinced that one of the others is the murderer, yet none can prove it, and the sense that the killer is picking them off according to a plan becomes unbearable.

The survivors resolve to keep together and let no one out of sight. But in an evening of confusion, with the house dark and the storm roaring outside, they are briefly scattered, and when they gather again they make a stunning discovery: Justice Wargrave sits motionless in a chair, draped in a mockery of a judge's robes made from a scarlet curtain and a grey wig of wool, with a wound on his forehead. Dr. Armstrong examines him and pronounces him shot dead. The loss of the calm, authoritative judge, the man who had been directing their deliberations, leaves the four who remain more bewildered and frightened than ever. The missing revolver reappears, explaining nothing. With the storm still raging and no rescue possible, the survivors pass the night locked in their separate rooms, each certain the killer is one of the others.

By morning Dr. Armstrong has vanished from the house, and the three who remain, Vera Claythorne, Philip Lombard, and the former policeman Blore, conclude he must be the murderer. Keeping to the open ground where no one can approach unseen, they try to signal the mainland, but the sea is still too high for any boat to come. When Blore goes back to the house alone for food, he is killed by a heavy marble clock pushed from a window above, crushing his skull. Soon afterward Vera and Lombard find Armstrong's drowned body washed up at the water's edge: he has been dead too long to have killed Blore, and the arithmetic of the rhyme collapses onto the two of them. Each is now certain the other is the murderer. On the shore, in a moment of desperate quickness, Vera snatches Lombard's revolver and shoots him dead. Believing herself the sole survivor and safe at last, but wrung out by guilt over the drowned child in her past and by the horror of the weekend, she walks back to the house in a trance. In her room a noose hangs ready from a hook, a chair beneath it, matching the rhyme's final line. Overwhelmed, she steps up and hangs herself, the last of the ten to die.

When the police finally reach the island after the storm, they find ten corpses and no sign of any murderer: no one left alive who could have carried out the killings, and no plausible way for an outsider to have done it and escaped. Scotland Yard reconstructs what it can, but the evidence defies every theory, and the murders on Soldier Island remain an apparently unsolvable puzzle. The truth surfaces only in a written confession, sealed in a bottle and thrown into the sea, later recovered by a fishing trawler. The killer was Justice Wargrave himself. A dying man with a lifelong craving to punish the guilty and a secret desire to commit a perfect murder, he selected ten people he believed had each caused a death the law could not touch, and lured them to the island to execute them in the order and manner of the nursery rhyme. To escape detection he faked his own death partway through, enlisting the unsuspecting Dr. Armstrong's help to stage the shooting scene as a supposed trick to trap the killer, which let him move freely afterward while the others believed him already dead; he then lured Armstrong to the cliffs and drowned him, killed Blore, and counted on fear and guilt to finish the rest, leaving the noose ready for Vera. Finally he shot himself with an elastic contrivance that carried the revolver away from his body, so that he would be found laid out exactly as the others had seen him, just another victim. His confession, written for the satisfaction of having his design understood, is the only thing that reveals the truth.

The novel ends with every one of the ten people on Soldier Island dead and the crime seemingly impossible to solve. The last survivor, Vera Claythorne, alone and broken by guilt after shooting Philip Lombard, returns to the house to find a noose set out for her in keeping with the nursery rhyme and, in a trance of despair, hangs herself. When the police arrive, they are faced with ten corpses, a missing set of little soldier figurines, and no living suspect or explanation. The solution comes only afterward, through a confession the killer wrote and cast into the sea in a bottle. It reveals that the murderer was Justice Lawrence Wargrave, a dying judge who wished both to punish people he was certain had escaped justice for causing deaths and to commit one flawless, undetectable crime. He chose his ten targets, drew them to the island, and killed them one by one in the order of the rhyme, faking his own death partway through with the unwitting help of Dr. Armstrong so the others would stop suspecting him. After the rest were dead, he staged his final suicide to look like another murder, ensuring the police would find the case unsolvable, and confessed only so that the cleverness of his scheme would one day be understood.