Two Ways to Tell a Tale

Agatha Christie published the mystery novel later called Ten Little Indians in 1939, under an even more offensive title. For obvious reasons, the American edition was retitled And Then There Were None, and the rhyme that drives the plot was at some point changed to read "Ten little soldiers." Despite the revolting racism that recurs throughout the original version, the novel has been popular ever since its publication (100 million sold, says Wikipedia), and the change in title and revision of the nursery rhyme renders the novel pretty unobjectionable.

Yukito Ayatsuji copied the major plot elements of Agatha Christie's novel in a Japanese novel titled The Decagon House Murders in 1986. An English translation of Ayatsuji's novel was published in 2015, with a second English version in 2020. The racist elements of the earlier Christie publications are not present in this novel, and the nursery rhyme doesn't appear.

I read the Agatha Christie novel a long time ago, and I just read/reread both of these novels this week. I find Christie's original to be a much better book. The main plot of both novels is that a group of individuals stranded on an island are murdered one-by-one at the hands of a revenge-mad member of their group. As the days and murders go by, the terrorized members of the group in each book are totally unable to figure out who the perpetrator is. 

Christie's action never moves off the island. She relentlessly focuses on the group of men and women in a modern luxury house who are being attacked by some mad person. In contrast, the chapters of Ayatsuji's novel alternate between the stranded victims on the island and a small group of men on the mainland who are trying to solve another murder that took place six months earlier on the same island. This destroys the intensity of Christie's imitated plot. 

Ayatsuji made a number of other changes. The seven individuals on the island are all members of a mystery club, and go by nicknames chosen from the most famous British, French, and American mystery writers (like Ellery and Agatha). Reference to earlier writers is a major part of the story. The ten victims assembled on Christie's island, in contrast, have no prior acquaintance with one another, and don't see themselves as part of a literary event. In fact, they haven't a clue why they are on the island or why anyone would suddenly begin killing them, one after another, except that each is accused of a long-ago misdeed that resulted in someone's death, though not criminal. 

In a memoir cited at the beginning of the current edition of her book, Christie said "I had written this book because it was so difficult to do that the idea had fascinated me. Ten people had to die without it becoming ridiculous or the murderer being obvious." I think she did much better than her imitator, who took advantage of Christie's having worked out the difficulties of this challenging plot, but made it much clumsier.

In fact, I think Ayatsuji's imitations are sometimes a bit pathetic in their faithfulness to the original. For example, in both books the survivors, after each murder, move the corpses to the beds in the rooms where they had been sleeping in the house on the island. In both books, the terrified victims begin to fear being poisoned, and thus to eat almost nothing but preserved food from cans opened in front of them or alcoholic drinks from previously unopened bottles. (Interestingly, in the 1939 book, it is canned beef tongue that recurs until the victims are sick of it, a rather strange and dated detail in my opinion.)

In sum, I think that Christie's building of suspense and terror is much better handled and more dramatic. Not to mention that Christie's plot was her superb and original invention! I'm sure everything I've said has been said before in the 80 years since she published.

Review © 2022 mae sander.