After a minute or two, while [the two men] stood watching Lombard’s progress [climbing down the cliff on a rope], Blore said:

“Climbs like a cat, doesn’t he?”

There was something odd in his voice.

Dr. Armstrong said:

“I should think he must have done some mountaineering in his time.”

“Maybe.”

There was a silence and then the ex-Inspector said:

“Funny sort of cove altogether. D’you know what I think?”

“What?”

“He’s a wrong ‘un!”

Armstrong said doubtfully:

“In what way?”

Blore grunted. Then he said:

“I don’t know — exactly. But I wouldn’t trust him a yard.”

And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie, pp. 107 – 108

This is a very tense book. I was planning to dedicate an entire Friday post to it, but being short on time, I’m just using this quote from it on Quote Wednesday.

This bit of dialogue really shows the atmosphere of the book, and how the atmosphere is coming from the theme. In most Christie murder mysteries, there is one murderer among a group of people who are not murderers (even if they are not innocent in other ways). In this book, ten people are trapped together on a small island. None of them knows the others very well, and so they don’t trust each other either. As the book unfolds, it becomes clear that this lack of trust is well founded. Every single guest on the island has committed a murder in the past. They are all capable of killing. As Christie says in her other books, once a murderer has killed, they will do it again. So, any one of them could be “the murderer” who is picking off the guests one by one. In a sense, they are all “the murderer.” They are all a “wrong ‘un.”

I didn’t much enjoy this book the first time I read it, because it so disorienting (one point of the book was to create “an impossible puzzle”). The second time through, I was of course less confused, but I also didn’t enjoy it much because there is no character we can sympathize with. The one who comes closest, Vera, turns out to have been responsible for the death of a child. She, too, is a wrong ‘un.

The third time, this summer, I appreciate that this book is a sort of exaggerated picture of our predicament as human beings. We are trapped in this world (the island) surrounded by people, including ourselves, who are all totally depraved, who are all “wrong ‘uns.”