And Justice For All? (My thoughts on And Then There None)
This post will probably be contentious - I welcome debate but not insults or trolling. Ok here goes:
Seeing the recent tv adaptations has made re-read some of the essays on some websites such as Smoop and Sparknotes and a lot of the people writing for them are heavy handed in their condemnation of the murderer. And while this is understandable no one wants to be seen to condoning vigilantism after all since it's dangerous to send out the message that's it's ok and also lets face it the combination of sadism and self-righteousness the murderer betrays is the unhappy combination of unpleasant people like Grand Inquisitors, conquistadors, high ranking SS officers, witch hunters and no doubt torturers for various fundamentalist Islamic states. However - and this is where I am no doubt inviting people to rain down hell on me - IMO it is still difficult to entirely condemn him. Therein lies the resonance of the piece at least for me - it's about the posing of questions about justice as a broad concept which don't necessarily have black and white answers.
For example such guides point out that a lot of the 'victims' of this cull of 'murderers'aren't technically murderers at all but really I suspect that someone who has lost a loved one or ones to an unduly careless driver, gross medical incompetence or combining elements of both drunken drivers may well beg to differ. Such legal distinctions may mean little to them understandably. Also the J B Priestly play "An Inspector Calls" which was recently adapted for the small screen at least poses the idea that a woman who turned her back on a pregnant woman in need bore at least some responsiblity for her subsequent suicide - a parallel with Emily Brent that could not have been lost on Miranda Richardson who played both characters guilty of this. Like Wargrave and Christie - Priestly and his Inspector believe this woman had blood on her hands. No woman is an island and a woman who ignores this is culpable who matters how righteous she believes herself to be. Emily Brent condemns Lombard's leaving me to starve stating that these men were his brothers even if they were of a different race - probably a radical idea at the time when the original title of the work is pretty racist - but her concept of shared humanity failed when it came to someone who didn't share her rigid morality.
On the other hand what is often not pointed out is that in a sense what condemns many of these people is that in a lot of cases ultimately murder didn't pay for them and some are suffering from intangible effects from what they've done.
The Rogers are still servants - they still have to earn a living whatever they gained financially it wasn't enough to set them up for life - you wonder what made them do it. Ethel Rogers pays a price another way - the guilt of what she and her husband did has never left her. "I don't think she ever felt safe" Vera Claythorne observes in the book. Vera herself has damaged her career and gained nothing. Philip Lombard takes the job that will lead to his death because he is flat broke despite a career of ruthlessly doing anything for money. General John McArthur loses the wife who was his motive for the deed anyway and ends up lonely because the friends he might have either strongly suspect what he did or he suspects they suspect which makes him paranoid and he shuns company as a result. He is there in the trap because that loneliness leads him to accept an offer of possible company.
His guilt is also probably a factor in both that loneliness itself - we often project our own opinion of ourselves onto others - and the fatalism that he embraces shortly before he dies.
You wonder if Blore is doing that well for himself either if he's moonlighting doing detective work privately. Also is the guy who we don't see die in the adaptation Isaac Morris - who hires Lombard and is used by Wargrave in making the arrangements on the island - a hypochondriac who has trouble sleeping because of his own feelings of guilt over dope peddling and other shady activities -both of which get him killed. Lombard uses the former to get him to take a draught which is poisoned because of the later which resulted in the death of a daughter of friends of Wargrave's.
There are questions of our complicity too. One of the reasons why I'm glad the recent adaptation of the work had the guts to screen its original conclusion is partly due to the fact it keeps the ambiguity - no one is 'innocent' and the murderer gets away with it - but also if I'm honest because like Wargrave I'm a bit in love the macabre game of ten figures dying one by one as per the rhyme. Christie who is probably at least one of the most famous mystery writers in the world can't have been blind to this draw to the dark side in both herself and her readers. We remain as we were back then fascinated by murder most foul. As many reviewers point out a lot of slasher horror owes something to this work with the murdering of victims one by one often with a theme behind the murders and some even echo the idea of justice. "I Know What You Did Last Summer" is an obvious example but the 'you have sex you die' and 'the virgin survives' tropes set by John Carpenter's Halloweon that have semi-parodied in the original 'Scream' and 'Cabin in the Woods' are also in a sense of a reflection of the idea that you are murdered because you are morally deficient. Like Wargrave a part of us is both sadistic and judgmental and these works reflect that. As the blogger and tweeter Monkseal observes Vera is almost a subversion of the 'good girl survives' trope before it began in that she isn't good and she doesn't survive. Many adaptations subvert that and undermine both and destroy the questions she poses.
So what do the 'soldiers' who were once less politically correct figures represent?
In a sense what the deaths satisfying (and yes there are at least to most people) that none are without the capacity to have made the 'right' choices - none are mentally ill, disturbed or disabled to the extent where that can be used as a mitigating factor. Some are possibly sociopathic but then that's a grey area in itself. None kill because voices told them to or they lacked the mental capacity to understand what they were doing and none are children too immature to understand what they were doing. But the first victim/murderer is so arguably because of immaturity. Wargrave describes Anthony Marsden "as a pagan sort born without a sense of responsibility" in his 'confession'. I wouldn't put it like that but I know what he means - Marsden is obviously a very young man - probably in his early twenties - who's had a very sheltered and privileged life that hasn't really given him much of a sense of the suffering of others or probably not much awareness of them at all. My boss has stated that young men can sometimes have a very poor sense of their own limits - that they can feel all powerful. Indeed there is this sense to Marsden. Vera describes him as appearing like a young god and in some ways he probably felt like that - immortal and a law onto himself. I think that sometimes when we're older we forget how reckless we are when we're young - that we take risks we subsequently know we shouldn't have. I'm ashamed to admit I probably drove when I was young a few times I really shouldn't have. Men driving too fast behind the wheel is nothing new and it I think has a lot to do with arrogance and recklessness of youth. The lack of conscience is really a lack of awareness and responsibility and the maturity you need to counter these things. What Marsden does and his lack of guilt over it are pretty reprehensible but in a sense Wargrave is right they are born of an almost innocent selfishness. Marsden is not malicious in any way - he doesn't deserve to be torturer. Does he deserve to die - well that's debatable. There's a chance he might become a better man in time although he doesn't look promising.
Ethel Rogers is already tortured by herself as is General McArthur. In some ways I feel sorriest for them - their guilt makes them more sympathetic but in a sense it justifies their deaths to us. We are led to believe it's better that they are at peace. He is also old which arguably there is a less of a sense of his life being taken away and he has less time to make up for what he's done. He seems to be reconciled to his fate and frightens Vera by saying that she can't understand the peace it will bring. The guilt 'earns' them the dubious mercy of early and relatively calm deaths. We don't really know why Thomas Rogers does the deed he's condemned for but in the book it's by neglect - he doesn't smoother the elderly charge in his care but him and his wife simply withhold medicine she needs to stay alive from her. I think it's Lombard who states "No poison to obtain... just neglect. Must have been tempting." We don't know if it's real financial need or simply greed that tempted him - and I think not many would argue that he wasn't the prime instigator of the crime rather than his nervy wife. Nor unlike the telly adaptation is there any indication that he bullies his wife or is violent towards her - he seems pretty upset when she dies. Rogers's death itself sends out mixed signals as to how the murderer views him - it's violent but it's early - he's struck in the back of the head even if it with an axe so he might not have been aware of it and he doesn't have to endure the paranoid and terrifying atmosphere in the house for long. Although he doesn't need to he already seems more scared for much of it then the more hardened types around him. He is also trapped by his position in society - he's a servant and he has to keep on serving ironically doing what he's meant to be doing condemns him practically as much as dereliction of duty gets him marked out for such a fate. It's also possible that he is removed when he is to make it that much worse for everyone else who now have to serve themselves and are reduced to eating cold meat out of tins.
Emily Brent is not the type that many feel much pity for - even less nowadays then in the past. When it comes to characters it's very much a truism - judge not lest yet be judged yourself. Maybe it's just me but I hate the sanctimonious - especially in fiction and to some extent in life too. If I was to draw up a list of my most loathed fictional characters a lot of them would have that quality. Ergo it's all the more satisfying when they are judged themselves and they deserve it - and yet in a sense it's somewhat hypocritical of the murderer to do it and in a sense of us ourselves too. She does by default what he actively does - which is to kill because of a violation of a very rigid moral code that not everyone would argee with. Like him she is cold hearted, merciless, utterly self-justified and as Vera thinks 'terrible'. Does he kill her early because of that similarity? - because whatever we think of her actions she believed them right - or is it because her 'murder' wasn't deliberate. There's also some indication that her actions prey on her mind more than she thinks as she is thinking of her 'victim' at the time of her death and writes that her victim is the murderer in her journal in a moment of weakness much to her surprise.
The actual murderer Wargrave is a mixture of traits - he admits freely in his 'confession' that he is a lifelong sadist and like many of that ilk he's also a control freak. He's dying anyway so he will die doing something he likes and in the way he chooses. He's arrogant too - you find out he did it because he can't resist bragging about it in a letter - before he kills himself and creates an 'unsolvable mystery' which is again something he intends - and he admits this in the letter too. Yet he does have a genuine sense of justice - in his confession he states although he enjoyed watching suffering he could never inflict it on an innocent person that although he had a rep as a hanging judge he never angled for the execution of a person he didn't believe was proved to be guilty. He very cleverly has an accusation on the record of murder of a man who was personable but the evidence clearly showed was guilty of not only murder but an abuse of trust. He very clearly takes a dim view of the abuse of trust. Also like Lombard he's a bastard who knows who and what he is and is honest when it doesn't contradict his goals. Christie herself seems conflicted about him - she describes him as having a cruel and predatory mouth as he contemplates the death of the trial where he condemned to death the man who appears in the 'accusation' so she doesn't condone him but I don't think she entirely condemns him either. Like him many of us like seeing the guilty suffer and are fascinated by both brutality and justice. He is a part of many of us and that's both interesting and creepy. A lot of modern horror often has an antagonist who is either the protagonist or some aspect of their own psyche. In a sense seeing Wargrave fulfill his plan perhaps encourages us to accept that part of ourselves even by admitting that it's satisfying to do so.
I think how you view Dr George Armstrong depends on how you view addicts to a degree. Wargrave condemns him for reasons that are as much to do with how he betrays a high position and one of such trust rather than the reasons why he does it. With great power comes great responsibility and what is greater than the power over someone's life and health? When are you more vulnerable then when entrusting someone to make you better and especially when undergoing surgery? Probably the kindest person I ever knew was killed by medical incompetence and at her funeral the sense of anger and injustice over it was as palatable as the grief. He also gets away with killing a patient without any repercussions because of his position. And yet arguably he was ill himself - he seems to have at the time being at least a borderline alcoholic - which you can call an illness and what happened was enough of a wake-up call for him to recover from it - although he doesn't seem to do anything to actively atone for his actions. He does feel guilt on some level as nightmares haunt him. However I think one of the reasons why he invites Wargrave's contempt and some degree ours is that he displays a character that you suspect might be the reason behind his drinking in the first place. He isn't the worst specimen of humanity on the island but he's not a heroic figure. What we saw in the tv adaptation is a bit of an exaggeration of how he's portrayed in the book but it's a plausible one - the man in the book is one that you could easily believe would swear, drink to excess again, rant and become hysterical under the pressure he's under. The adaptation I think captures well that he's also stupider than he believes himself to be. Wargrave contemptuously thinks he has 'a thoroughly commonplace mind' as he uses the phrase 'murdered in our beds' to him and in a sense the irony of it is that he abuses a high position which condemns him but it doesn't occur to him that another professional man could be equally guilty of doing so. It's odd that his gullibility makes him an easier victim because it's not a trait that increases his guilt but it is one that makes us look down on him possibly leading us to deduce that he drank too much and killed someone because he was a weak character although it maybe that he was kept alive for so long because of that gullibility and easily led nature - Wargrave needed a patsy to fake his own death and what better one than a doctor. Does he deserve to die because of it possibly not but it doesn't make us like him.
Blore is equally dense and unheroic but like Armstrong he's in the firing line for abusing a high position. Yet despite his almost bog-standard nature he's much more despicable than Armstrong. Jeffery Archer has come out with some utter bullshit in his time but he was right on the money with stating in one of his books that even the press loathe a bent copper. I don't know if Blore is portrayed in a worse light in the book than in the tv adaptation but both are pretty bad. In some ways in the book he's worse because he takes a bung from a criminal gang to fit up an innocent man for their crime who dies in prison and this scumbag gets promoted for it although he ruefully comments the money he got from the gang wasn't much. He doesn't admit any sort of guilt until pretty late when Lombard ferrets it out of him and he doesn't seem very sorry about what he's done. His death is probably the most gruesome of the lot probably indicating that Wargrave feels the most contempt for him. He states in his exposition letter that he feels people need to be able to trust policeman and takes a very harsh view of the fact that Blore betrayed that. It also perhaps illustrates that Wargrave does care about justice as Blore sins as much against justice itself as against a specific person.
Lombard doesn't just kill one person. He is paradoxically the most amoral but also the most honest character of the whole piece. He is probably the one person who never tells a single lie the whole time he's on the island and the only one who freely admits he did what the record said he did after it was played. He doesn't initially tell people he's armed that's more a lie of omission and there are plenty of those around. The admission of guilt though shows that he doesn't regret what he did and that he did it to ruthlessly save his own skin. He doesn't appear to have nightmares about his actions either - it really doesn't bother him. He doesn't appear to be evil though as just very very hardened - he isn't a sadist he doesn't kill people for pleasure he's a mercenary - a spectacularly ruthless one but is lack of lying probably means we can exonerate him from being a sociopath. He freely admits that he did murder a whole bunch of people he'd do merely for what he could get out of it - i.e. he'd do it for money. However there is something admirable almost about the way that Lombard is honest to himself and others - he is what is he and he doesn't care if you don't like that and won't lie to make you. We don't exactly root for him though because he's too cold hearted for that and you really can make no case for him not deserving to die. Ironically for someone who freely admit he's all about taking care of number one - it's his connection to someone else that undoes him in practical terms. Again like with Armstrong the most recent adaptation makes sub-text text possibly. It's not totally beyond the realm of possibility that he and Vera had a fling - he's obviously attracted to her the first time he sees her thinking she's 'a cool customer' who 'could hold her own in love and war' and that he'd 'like to take her on' in the Nordic pop band A-ha sense. I'm not sure he's capable of love but he seems to have a sense of chivalry towards women in general and her in particular which she uses to stay alive and kill him.
They are easily the most intelligent of Wargrave's victims and you got the impression he enjoyed toying with them as much to challenge himself as to make them suffer. It's also interesting that he doesn't kill either of them directly he pays her the very twisted compliment of leaving her to do it for him. He trusts that she's smart and capable enough to kill an experienced and ruthless mercenary in Wargrave's exposition at the end he describes her as "a daring and resourceful woman" and that she was "a match for him [Lombard] and more." So there's a touch of admiration along with the contempt but the contempt is definitely there. She's perceptive enough to spot it early 'a man who is used to weighing up humanity and he doesn't like me one little bit' she thinks and early in the thoughts of his we're allowed to see we see he thinks of her as 'a cold hearted hussy'. The adaptation doesn't show this but when she screams in her room remembering the fateful day at the beach it's because he suspended some seaweed from the hook in her room. This was done partially to distract the others so he could set up his 'death' but some of it was probably done to torment her and mess with her head motivated by sadism or also where he wants her to be at the end of it all.
Does she deserve this contempt and it's results? Well - I'm afraid the answer is probably yes - and in a sense of the second part of the twisted compliment Wargrave pays her is that he believes rightly he can play enough on her feelings of guilt - both for the original crime buried deep though there are and for Lombard to an extent- to get her to kill herself. He knows that Lombard will never care enough to sacrifice his sense of self-preservation but he wants Vera to understand and feel the full weight of what she's done as much as he wants her to die for it.
I think the reason that a lot of adaptations chicken out when it comes to Vera because she poses such difficult questions about what a murderer is and especially who a female murderer might be that go double for the murder of a child. Most of us don't have it within us to be Lombard or someone like him. We're not that ruthless or that remorseless or if we were we would lie about it to ourselves at least - like Pi would literally turn that part of ourselves into a beast in our own minds. We're also highly unlikely to know anyone like him. Vera is frighteningly like us and someone we might easily know or trust or even love. When I first read the book I thought she'd be harshly treated but age, some thought and becoming a mum have made me realize no she hasn't. Monkseal describes her as the worst of the lot and whilst she isn't quite as bad in the book you could certainly make a case for that.
The one thing you don't get in the adaptation is how much the child Cyril continually nags to do the swim to the rock that will kill him. 'Whiny, irritating repetition' is how Vera remembers it in the book and I think anyone with children who knows people without them can understand how annoying that can be for them and for you. I'm afraid in a minor sense I've given in to it - the sweet thing, the toy, the magazine, the bit of telly that perhaps you shouldn't have agreed to but that repetition wears you down. Of course most people would never give it to something as dangerous to your child as what Vera does but she's NOT the kid's mother and actually her feelings (and they are feelings that are the precurser to becoming a mother) lead her against him. She also starts to justify it before she does it that the kid is puny and might not live long anyway.
What's interesting is that the work goes against modern sensibilities. Love here does not justify everything and in fact it's what turns Vera into a selfish enough person to be a monster because she is a monster. She doesn't seem to be at first - the book intiallly sets her up to be the heroine - the plucky girl survivor. She is rightly horrified by Lombard and Emily Brent's confessions and their lack of remorse and she's our viewpoint character for much of the action but she's a hypocrite and she's in denial. I think one of the things the adaptation showed well was the impact of our actions - the grief and guilt of the child's mother which Vera faced without flinching preoccupied only with getting her man. As Fitz in Cracker confronted a female serial killer 'I've seen the pain and grief that murder causes and it's usually done by sentimental pieces of shit like you.' In some wasy the tv adaptation is kinder to Vera because at least she's thinking the child as she kills herself rather than in the book where she's thinking of the man she's lost. She loses him because she doesn't understand there are lots of forms of love and some of them are genuinely unselfish. She doesn't understand how Hugo can genuinely love a child who is not lovable to her and who stands in the way of him being able to marry the person he loves - not getting that she's only there because of the child. Like him we realize that she's not whom we initially thought she was. As he says to Wargrave on the cruise ship when Wargrave brings up the subject of murderers "I've known a murderess, was crazy about her and she sort of did it for me. You wouldn't have thought that a nice jolly girl would let a little kid out to sea and watch it drown but she didn't understand I loved that kid." Murder and murderers are not always what we expect even to themselves. Vera muses before she kills herself that when she remembers telling Cyril he could swim to the rock that 'that's what murder is' as simple as that. That is the problem that a lot of adaptations duck and perhaps why this one made her a bit worse because of it - which is that it's a pretty scary concept to take in. In the words of the late Freddie Mercury 'Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me'.
Seeing the recent tv adaptations has made re-read some of the essays on some websites such as Smoop and Sparknotes and a lot of the people writing for them are heavy handed in their condemnation of the murderer. And while this is understandable no one wants to be seen to condoning vigilantism after all since it's dangerous to send out the message that's it's ok and also lets face it the combination of sadism and self-righteousness the murderer betrays is the unhappy combination of unpleasant people like Grand Inquisitors, conquistadors, high ranking SS officers, witch hunters and no doubt torturers for various fundamentalist Islamic states. However - and this is where I am no doubt inviting people to rain down hell on me - IMO it is still difficult to entirely condemn him. Therein lies the resonance of the piece at least for me - it's about the posing of questions about justice as a broad concept which don't necessarily have black and white answers.
For example such guides point out that a lot of the 'victims' of this cull of 'murderers'aren't technically murderers at all but really I suspect that someone who has lost a loved one or ones to an unduly careless driver, gross medical incompetence or combining elements of both drunken drivers may well beg to differ. Such legal distinctions may mean little to them understandably. Also the J B Priestly play "An Inspector Calls" which was recently adapted for the small screen at least poses the idea that a woman who turned her back on a pregnant woman in need bore at least some responsiblity for her subsequent suicide - a parallel with Emily Brent that could not have been lost on Miranda Richardson who played both characters guilty of this. Like Wargrave and Christie - Priestly and his Inspector believe this woman had blood on her hands. No woman is an island and a woman who ignores this is culpable who matters how righteous she believes herself to be. Emily Brent condemns Lombard's leaving me to starve stating that these men were his brothers even if they were of a different race - probably a radical idea at the time when the original title of the work is pretty racist - but her concept of shared humanity failed when it came to someone who didn't share her rigid morality.
On the other hand what is often not pointed out is that in a sense what condemns many of these people is that in a lot of cases ultimately murder didn't pay for them and some are suffering from intangible effects from what they've done.
The Rogers are still servants - they still have to earn a living whatever they gained financially it wasn't enough to set them up for life - you wonder what made them do it. Ethel Rogers pays a price another way - the guilt of what she and her husband did has never left her. "I don't think she ever felt safe" Vera Claythorne observes in the book. Vera herself has damaged her career and gained nothing. Philip Lombard takes the job that will lead to his death because he is flat broke despite a career of ruthlessly doing anything for money. General John McArthur loses the wife who was his motive for the deed anyway and ends up lonely because the friends he might have either strongly suspect what he did or he suspects they suspect which makes him paranoid and he shuns company as a result. He is there in the trap because that loneliness leads him to accept an offer of possible company.
His guilt is also probably a factor in both that loneliness itself - we often project our own opinion of ourselves onto others - and the fatalism that he embraces shortly before he dies.
You wonder if Blore is doing that well for himself either if he's moonlighting doing detective work privately. Also is the guy who we don't see die in the adaptation Isaac Morris - who hires Lombard and is used by Wargrave in making the arrangements on the island - a hypochondriac who has trouble sleeping because of his own feelings of guilt over dope peddling and other shady activities -both of which get him killed. Lombard uses the former to get him to take a draught which is poisoned because of the later which resulted in the death of a daughter of friends of Wargrave's.
There are questions of our complicity too. One of the reasons why I'm glad the recent adaptation of the work had the guts to screen its original conclusion is partly due to the fact it keeps the ambiguity - no one is 'innocent' and the murderer gets away with it - but also if I'm honest because like Wargrave I'm a bit in love the macabre game of ten figures dying one by one as per the rhyme. Christie who is probably at least one of the most famous mystery writers in the world can't have been blind to this draw to the dark side in both herself and her readers. We remain as we were back then fascinated by murder most foul. As many reviewers point out a lot of slasher horror owes something to this work with the murdering of victims one by one often with a theme behind the murders and some even echo the idea of justice. "I Know What You Did Last Summer" is an obvious example but the 'you have sex you die' and 'the virgin survives' tropes set by John Carpenter's Halloweon that have semi-parodied in the original 'Scream' and 'Cabin in the Woods' are also in a sense of a reflection of the idea that you are murdered because you are morally deficient. Like Wargrave a part of us is both sadistic and judgmental and these works reflect that. As the blogger and tweeter Monkseal observes Vera is almost a subversion of the 'good girl survives' trope before it began in that she isn't good and she doesn't survive. Many adaptations subvert that and undermine both and destroy the questions she poses.
So what do the 'soldiers' who were once less politically correct figures represent?
In a sense what the deaths satisfying (and yes there are at least to most people) that none are without the capacity to have made the 'right' choices - none are mentally ill, disturbed or disabled to the extent where that can be used as a mitigating factor. Some are possibly sociopathic but then that's a grey area in itself. None kill because voices told them to or they lacked the mental capacity to understand what they were doing and none are children too immature to understand what they were doing. But the first victim/murderer is so arguably because of immaturity. Wargrave describes Anthony Marsden "as a pagan sort born without a sense of responsibility" in his 'confession'. I wouldn't put it like that but I know what he means - Marsden is obviously a very young man - probably in his early twenties - who's had a very sheltered and privileged life that hasn't really given him much of a sense of the suffering of others or probably not much awareness of them at all. My boss has stated that young men can sometimes have a very poor sense of their own limits - that they can feel all powerful. Indeed there is this sense to Marsden. Vera describes him as appearing like a young god and in some ways he probably felt like that - immortal and a law onto himself. I think that sometimes when we're older we forget how reckless we are when we're young - that we take risks we subsequently know we shouldn't have. I'm ashamed to admit I probably drove when I was young a few times I really shouldn't have. Men driving too fast behind the wheel is nothing new and it I think has a lot to do with arrogance and recklessness of youth. The lack of conscience is really a lack of awareness and responsibility and the maturity you need to counter these things. What Marsden does and his lack of guilt over it are pretty reprehensible but in a sense Wargrave is right they are born of an almost innocent selfishness. Marsden is not malicious in any way - he doesn't deserve to be torturer. Does he deserve to die - well that's debatable. There's a chance he might become a better man in time although he doesn't look promising.
Ethel Rogers is already tortured by herself as is General McArthur. In some ways I feel sorriest for them - their guilt makes them more sympathetic but in a sense it justifies their deaths to us. We are led to believe it's better that they are at peace. He is also old which arguably there is a less of a sense of his life being taken away and he has less time to make up for what he's done. He seems to be reconciled to his fate and frightens Vera by saying that she can't understand the peace it will bring. The guilt 'earns' them the dubious mercy of early and relatively calm deaths. We don't really know why Thomas Rogers does the deed he's condemned for but in the book it's by neglect - he doesn't smoother the elderly charge in his care but him and his wife simply withhold medicine she needs to stay alive from her. I think it's Lombard who states "No poison to obtain... just neglect. Must have been tempting." We don't know if it's real financial need or simply greed that tempted him - and I think not many would argue that he wasn't the prime instigator of the crime rather than his nervy wife. Nor unlike the telly adaptation is there any indication that he bullies his wife or is violent towards her - he seems pretty upset when she dies. Rogers's death itself sends out mixed signals as to how the murderer views him - it's violent but it's early - he's struck in the back of the head even if it with an axe so he might not have been aware of it and he doesn't have to endure the paranoid and terrifying atmosphere in the house for long. Although he doesn't need to he already seems more scared for much of it then the more hardened types around him. He is also trapped by his position in society - he's a servant and he has to keep on serving ironically doing what he's meant to be doing condemns him practically as much as dereliction of duty gets him marked out for such a fate. It's also possible that he is removed when he is to make it that much worse for everyone else who now have to serve themselves and are reduced to eating cold meat out of tins.
Emily Brent is not the type that many feel much pity for - even less nowadays then in the past. When it comes to characters it's very much a truism - judge not lest yet be judged yourself. Maybe it's just me but I hate the sanctimonious - especially in fiction and to some extent in life too. If I was to draw up a list of my most loathed fictional characters a lot of them would have that quality. Ergo it's all the more satisfying when they are judged themselves and they deserve it - and yet in a sense it's somewhat hypocritical of the murderer to do it and in a sense of us ourselves too. She does by default what he actively does - which is to kill because of a violation of a very rigid moral code that not everyone would argee with. Like him she is cold hearted, merciless, utterly self-justified and as Vera thinks 'terrible'. Does he kill her early because of that similarity? - because whatever we think of her actions she believed them right - or is it because her 'murder' wasn't deliberate. There's also some indication that her actions prey on her mind more than she thinks as she is thinking of her 'victim' at the time of her death and writes that her victim is the murderer in her journal in a moment of weakness much to her surprise.
The actual murderer Wargrave is a mixture of traits - he admits freely in his 'confession' that he is a lifelong sadist and like many of that ilk he's also a control freak. He's dying anyway so he will die doing something he likes and in the way he chooses. He's arrogant too - you find out he did it because he can't resist bragging about it in a letter - before he kills himself and creates an 'unsolvable mystery' which is again something he intends - and he admits this in the letter too. Yet he does have a genuine sense of justice - in his confession he states although he enjoyed watching suffering he could never inflict it on an innocent person that although he had a rep as a hanging judge he never angled for the execution of a person he didn't believe was proved to be guilty. He very cleverly has an accusation on the record of murder of a man who was personable but the evidence clearly showed was guilty of not only murder but an abuse of trust. He very clearly takes a dim view of the abuse of trust. Also like Lombard he's a bastard who knows who and what he is and is honest when it doesn't contradict his goals. Christie herself seems conflicted about him - she describes him as having a cruel and predatory mouth as he contemplates the death of the trial where he condemned to death the man who appears in the 'accusation' so she doesn't condone him but I don't think she entirely condemns him either. Like him many of us like seeing the guilty suffer and are fascinated by both brutality and justice. He is a part of many of us and that's both interesting and creepy. A lot of modern horror often has an antagonist who is either the protagonist or some aspect of their own psyche. In a sense seeing Wargrave fulfill his plan perhaps encourages us to accept that part of ourselves even by admitting that it's satisfying to do so.
I think how you view Dr George Armstrong depends on how you view addicts to a degree. Wargrave condemns him for reasons that are as much to do with how he betrays a high position and one of such trust rather than the reasons why he does it. With great power comes great responsibility and what is greater than the power over someone's life and health? When are you more vulnerable then when entrusting someone to make you better and especially when undergoing surgery? Probably the kindest person I ever knew was killed by medical incompetence and at her funeral the sense of anger and injustice over it was as palatable as the grief. He also gets away with killing a patient without any repercussions because of his position. And yet arguably he was ill himself - he seems to have at the time being at least a borderline alcoholic - which you can call an illness and what happened was enough of a wake-up call for him to recover from it - although he doesn't seem to do anything to actively atone for his actions. He does feel guilt on some level as nightmares haunt him. However I think one of the reasons why he invites Wargrave's contempt and some degree ours is that he displays a character that you suspect might be the reason behind his drinking in the first place. He isn't the worst specimen of humanity on the island but he's not a heroic figure. What we saw in the tv adaptation is a bit of an exaggeration of how he's portrayed in the book but it's a plausible one - the man in the book is one that you could easily believe would swear, drink to excess again, rant and become hysterical under the pressure he's under. The adaptation I think captures well that he's also stupider than he believes himself to be. Wargrave contemptuously thinks he has 'a thoroughly commonplace mind' as he uses the phrase 'murdered in our beds' to him and in a sense the irony of it is that he abuses a high position which condemns him but it doesn't occur to him that another professional man could be equally guilty of doing so. It's odd that his gullibility makes him an easier victim because it's not a trait that increases his guilt but it is one that makes us look down on him possibly leading us to deduce that he drank too much and killed someone because he was a weak character although it maybe that he was kept alive for so long because of that gullibility and easily led nature - Wargrave needed a patsy to fake his own death and what better one than a doctor. Does he deserve to die because of it possibly not but it doesn't make us like him.
Blore is equally dense and unheroic but like Armstrong he's in the firing line for abusing a high position. Yet despite his almost bog-standard nature he's much more despicable than Armstrong. Jeffery Archer has come out with some utter bullshit in his time but he was right on the money with stating in one of his books that even the press loathe a bent copper. I don't know if Blore is portrayed in a worse light in the book than in the tv adaptation but both are pretty bad. In some ways in the book he's worse because he takes a bung from a criminal gang to fit up an innocent man for their crime who dies in prison and this scumbag gets promoted for it although he ruefully comments the money he got from the gang wasn't much. He doesn't admit any sort of guilt until pretty late when Lombard ferrets it out of him and he doesn't seem very sorry about what he's done. His death is probably the most gruesome of the lot probably indicating that Wargrave feels the most contempt for him. He states in his exposition letter that he feels people need to be able to trust policeman and takes a very harsh view of the fact that Blore betrayed that. It also perhaps illustrates that Wargrave does care about justice as Blore sins as much against justice itself as against a specific person.
Lombard doesn't just kill one person. He is paradoxically the most amoral but also the most honest character of the whole piece. He is probably the one person who never tells a single lie the whole time he's on the island and the only one who freely admits he did what the record said he did after it was played. He doesn't initially tell people he's armed that's more a lie of omission and there are plenty of those around. The admission of guilt though shows that he doesn't regret what he did and that he did it to ruthlessly save his own skin. He doesn't appear to have nightmares about his actions either - it really doesn't bother him. He doesn't appear to be evil though as just very very hardened - he isn't a sadist he doesn't kill people for pleasure he's a mercenary - a spectacularly ruthless one but is lack of lying probably means we can exonerate him from being a sociopath. He freely admits that he did murder a whole bunch of people he'd do merely for what he could get out of it - i.e. he'd do it for money. However there is something admirable almost about the way that Lombard is honest to himself and others - he is what is he and he doesn't care if you don't like that and won't lie to make you. We don't exactly root for him though because he's too cold hearted for that and you really can make no case for him not deserving to die. Ironically for someone who freely admit he's all about taking care of number one - it's his connection to someone else that undoes him in practical terms. Again like with Armstrong the most recent adaptation makes sub-text text possibly. It's not totally beyond the realm of possibility that he and Vera had a fling - he's obviously attracted to her the first time he sees her thinking she's 'a cool customer' who 'could hold her own in love and war' and that he'd 'like to take her on' in the Nordic pop band A-ha sense. I'm not sure he's capable of love but he seems to have a sense of chivalry towards women in general and her in particular which she uses to stay alive and kill him.
They are easily the most intelligent of Wargrave's victims and you got the impression he enjoyed toying with them as much to challenge himself as to make them suffer. It's also interesting that he doesn't kill either of them directly he pays her the very twisted compliment of leaving her to do it for him. He trusts that she's smart and capable enough to kill an experienced and ruthless mercenary in Wargrave's exposition at the end he describes her as "a daring and resourceful woman" and that she was "a match for him [Lombard] and more." So there's a touch of admiration along with the contempt but the contempt is definitely there. She's perceptive enough to spot it early 'a man who is used to weighing up humanity and he doesn't like me one little bit' she thinks and early in the thoughts of his we're allowed to see we see he thinks of her as 'a cold hearted hussy'. The adaptation doesn't show this but when she screams in her room remembering the fateful day at the beach it's because he suspended some seaweed from the hook in her room. This was done partially to distract the others so he could set up his 'death' but some of it was probably done to torment her and mess with her head motivated by sadism or also where he wants her to be at the end of it all.
Does she deserve this contempt and it's results? Well - I'm afraid the answer is probably yes - and in a sense of the second part of the twisted compliment Wargrave pays her is that he believes rightly he can play enough on her feelings of guilt - both for the original crime buried deep though there are and for Lombard to an extent- to get her to kill herself. He knows that Lombard will never care enough to sacrifice his sense of self-preservation but he wants Vera to understand and feel the full weight of what she's done as much as he wants her to die for it.
I think the reason that a lot of adaptations chicken out when it comes to Vera because she poses such difficult questions about what a murderer is and especially who a female murderer might be that go double for the murder of a child. Most of us don't have it within us to be Lombard or someone like him. We're not that ruthless or that remorseless or if we were we would lie about it to ourselves at least - like Pi would literally turn that part of ourselves into a beast in our own minds. We're also highly unlikely to know anyone like him. Vera is frighteningly like us and someone we might easily know or trust or even love. When I first read the book I thought she'd be harshly treated but age, some thought and becoming a mum have made me realize no she hasn't. Monkseal describes her as the worst of the lot and whilst she isn't quite as bad in the book you could certainly make a case for that.
The one thing you don't get in the adaptation is how much the child Cyril continually nags to do the swim to the rock that will kill him. 'Whiny, irritating repetition' is how Vera remembers it in the book and I think anyone with children who knows people without them can understand how annoying that can be for them and for you. I'm afraid in a minor sense I've given in to it - the sweet thing, the toy, the magazine, the bit of telly that perhaps you shouldn't have agreed to but that repetition wears you down. Of course most people would never give it to something as dangerous to your child as what Vera does but she's NOT the kid's mother and actually her feelings (and they are feelings that are the precurser to becoming a mother) lead her against him. She also starts to justify it before she does it that the kid is puny and might not live long anyway.
What's interesting is that the work goes against modern sensibilities. Love here does not justify everything and in fact it's what turns Vera into a selfish enough person to be a monster because she is a monster. She doesn't seem to be at first - the book intiallly sets her up to be the heroine - the plucky girl survivor. She is rightly horrified by Lombard and Emily Brent's confessions and their lack of remorse and she's our viewpoint character for much of the action but she's a hypocrite and she's in denial. I think one of the things the adaptation showed well was the impact of our actions - the grief and guilt of the child's mother which Vera faced without flinching preoccupied only with getting her man. As Fitz in Cracker confronted a female serial killer 'I've seen the pain and grief that murder causes and it's usually done by sentimental pieces of shit like you.' In some wasy the tv adaptation is kinder to Vera because at least she's thinking the child as she kills herself rather than in the book where she's thinking of the man she's lost. She loses him because she doesn't understand there are lots of forms of love and some of them are genuinely unselfish. She doesn't understand how Hugo can genuinely love a child who is not lovable to her and who stands in the way of him being able to marry the person he loves - not getting that she's only there because of the child. Like him we realize that she's not whom we initially thought she was. As he says to Wargrave on the cruise ship when Wargrave brings up the subject of murderers "I've known a murderess, was crazy about her and she sort of did it for me. You wouldn't have thought that a nice jolly girl would let a little kid out to sea and watch it drown but she didn't understand I loved that kid." Murder and murderers are not always what we expect even to themselves. Vera muses before she kills herself that when she remembers telling Cyril he could swim to the rock that 'that's what murder is' as simple as that. That is the problem that a lot of adaptations duck and perhaps why this one made her a bit worse because of it - which is that it's a pretty scary concept to take in. In the words of the late Freddie Mercury 'Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me'.