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And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939)
There was something magical about an island - the mere word suggested fantasy. You lost touch with the world - an island was a world of its own. A world, perhaps, from which you might never return...
....Might?
Most Christies, you read at least twice, once to be led down the cosy bloodstained garden path, and then to check and see if you can work out where you missed the misleading bends and twisted flagstones that led you the wrong way. The good ones you can reread several more times even though you know 'the MacGuffin', because the sheer skill at plotting, the seamless mixture of old fashioned middleclass morality and its ever so proper immoral flipside, the tea and arsenic-laced crumpet feeling that makes the period cosies such fun (pretty well exemplified in her fondness for mixing murder with nursery rhymes, with the underlying grimness in all too many of the latter and brilliantly illustrated by Tom Adams' 1980s covers :)
There aren't that many that stand too many rereads, though (and I am someone who does reread voraciously, so I know). Characterisation wasn't her strong point, atmosphere could be fun but wasn't often deep, the psychology was startlingly dark but rarely complex, and with the passage of time her own prejudices and those of her time and place become more and more obvious and - especially in the 'lighter' reads - more and more offputting (though I have to say, in something like And Then There Was None it can inadvertently add to the effectiveness, adding an extra layer of xenophobic unpleasantness to the characters even beyond what Christie meant to write).
Her potboilers - even the better ones - were mainly about the puzzle, and you can only be fooled or fascinated by the puzzle so many times.
But there are some which do bear rereading, even when you know how it ends. And this - the best selling crime mystery of all time - is for me definitely one, probably because of the ineluctable way the plot unwinds around the characters, the way you actually know, in the back of your mind, how this is all going to pan out... for once, it's not solving the puzzle that's the main pleasure, it's seeing how it all works out and closes in, it's her best psychological mystery. For me (and I suspect for most readers) there's also, because of who these characters are, a rather uneasy but addictive helping of justice/Shadefreude flavouring the fear and growing dread.
Ten people, each with a dark secret, on an isolated island with no way off, and their pasts being used to punish them, and chanting in the background a doggerel, disturbingly cruel nursery rhyme. There's not much more I can say without spoiling what was one of her most celebrated plots (the other being The Murder of Roger Ackroyd which is one of those that in my opinion does NOT bear too many rereads, it's an utterly brilliant one-maybe-two-trick pony).
(I will mention, I was inspired to do this book next in the 100 because I have just seen the 2015 BBC miniseries which I will do a separate post on, but which I did rather love.)
(I should also mention, I'm not much taken by the cover of my copy, or most of those under the current name. The Tom Adams cover - which I have a copy of in my book of his Christie covers - is good but not one of his best, and for the original, startlingly intolerable even for the time UK title, which got changed for the US. Both have now been dropped, and a quick google will leave you in no doubt of why)