WMG / And Then There Were None

Agatha Christie killed off Vera Claythorne to avoid being committed to another potential detective series.

If Vera had not been so emotionally unstable at the book's end, she might have been able to spot the killer in her room, somehow trap him until the authorities came, and the mystery would've been solved. But Agatha Christie's publisher would have seen potential in this and demanded she write yet another detective series as a spin-off. Agatha foresaw this in the early stages of planning the novel and dreaded the idea of being committed to yet another detective she couldn't care less about as she already had enough on her hands (Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Col. Race, etc). Thus, she made Vera's personality less stable than originally planned and wrote in her suicide to kill any possibility of having another detective on her hands.

• Wait, why would Vera go free in the first place? Next to Lombard, her crime is the most heinous of the lot.
  • Which was the second reason AC didn't want to write a detective spin-off about Vera: To avoid controversy over turning a child murderess into a heroine when one of her biggest asshole victims in Murder on the Orient Express was a child killer (albeit, a somewhat more heinous one), which would make her look a tad hypocritical (unless she originally planned to throw in a plot twist that it was Hugo who really did it).
    • Ratchet was more than just a child killer. First, the child killing in question, as in the Lindburgh (sp?) kidnapping case that inspired it, was a case of You Said You Would Let Them Go / I Lied, whereas Vera's child killing was slightly less heinous since she was emotionally desperate and blinded by love. Second, Ratchet's child killing started a domino effect that resulted in four other deaths. Third, and most importantly, Ratchet was a mafioso who must have been responsible for a lot more deaths than just those five over the course of his life. Fourth, Vera is slightly off her rocker, whereas Ratchet is a perfectly sane monster. Nonetheless, I don't think that Agatha Christie would have ever even considered the idea of Vera being the hero of any story: she seemed to have very passionate ideas along the lines of both Humans Are Flawed and some people genuinely deserve to be murdered, and I'm betting she liked the idea of writing a story in which ten people who otherwise were Karma Houdinis after committing the kinds of murder/manslaughter/Driven to Suicide actions that easily go unpunished end up getting punished anyway. I'm not saying that she sympathized with Judge Wargrave either but she definitely wanted all the characters dead. You'll notice that in her revised version in which two characters live both of them are revealed to be innocent.

U.N.Owen is Jigsaw.

Oh, come on! They're both terminally ill, cryptic people who kill those they think deserve death one by one.

• Who were separated by decades. And both died. Even if he's a time traveler, he can't die twice.
  • More likely, Jigsaw found a record of U.N. Owen, and took that inspiration for his games.
  • Jigsaw had apprentices. Who's to say he himself was the first to stage "the game"? Perhaps there's a decades- or centuries-long line of successive killers. So Jugsaw was either inspired by Owen or trained by his apprentice.
  • Or, for a less extreme variant not requiring them to share a Verse, Jigsaw might simply have been a big Agatha Christie fan.
  • Wait a minute. Time traveler? Died twice??
  • But, Jigsaw gave all of his "gameplayers" a chance to live. U.N. Owen snuck up on his victims and murdered them, giving them no chance to survive.

Vera killed Cyril in the play and she is lying to Lombard when she says she didn't.

Vera thought Lombard would either kill her, or stop caring about her if he thought she was guilty, so she lied and said it was Cyril's uncle who killed the boy in hopes to make herself sound innocent. It's entirely plausible when you come to think of her tendency to lie in the book.

Vera is an older, darker Nancy Drew.

As Nancy grew older, the strain from solving so many cases over a short period of time caused her to have a nervous breakdown, so she moved to Europe, changed her name, and tried to start a new life as a governess for a little boy. However, the sight of Cyril reminded her too much of the child she saved in her first case that set her off on her detective career, and Hugo reminded her too much of Ned, the boyfriend she had to leave behind, which drove her insane to the point where she killed Cyril. She was smart enough to figure out the murders were being done according to the nursery rhyme, after all. And we don't get a concrete description on how she looks, other than "a bit schoolmistressy perhaps".

Lombard is Boggs from The Shawshank Redemption.

Lombard in the Russian version, that is. He was actually wearing a bulletproof vest when he got shot and faked being dead until the boat came to rescue him. Unfortunately, everyone else was dead by that time, and the boatman assumed Lombard was the murderer. When brought back to the main shore, Lombard escaped to America where he changed his name to Boggs; the authorities eventually saw through his scheme and sent him off to Shawshank prison. The two men look an awful lot alike, and it's possible Lombard's rape of Vera drove him to desire dominating himself over others. And we never did find out Boggs' reason for being there.

Vera's sister in the Hollywood adaptations is the Yandere.

Vera is awfully calm in the Hollywood versions for someone who was so unstable in the book. In the universe of the movies, it is Vera's sister who takes on the role of the Yandere. She thought her fiancee was going to leave her and, in her deranged state, killed him. Vera takes on the noble duty of taking all the blame as she knows her sister would never survive in such an environment. In the 1945 film version, she says "I took care of her to the very last", indicating her sister may have gone insane with guilt and hanged herself (explaining Vera's reluctance to hang herself at the film's end). And in the 1965 film version, the sister is in a mental institution, meaning that Vera decided to place her where she would be happier and be unable to harm anyone else. In the book's universe, it is her sister who is the more sensible, stable one of the two.

Anthony Marston and the characters based on him in the Hollywood adaptations are all the same person.

In the game, Marston is a German spy. This may or may not be canon in the book or movies, but perhaps he is the same person as all of the first victims because it is really Anthony Marston in disguise, and his real reason for going to the island is to seek new information for the Germans.

In the Hollywood adaptations, Charles Morley killed Philip Lombard.

Morley was lying when he said Lombard committed suicide. Lombard showed the letter to Morley to remark how extraordinary it all was. Morley saw an opportunity to get more money out of it, thus he shot Lombard and made it look like suicide. If he wasn't a murderer, after all, why would he have a gun on him to an opportunity to get rich? To protect himself? Or to bump off the potential competition?

In the Hollywood adaptations, Lombard is Lombard and he is just screwing with Vera's head.

In a typical pull-the-girl's-pigtails-to-show-how-much-you-like-her fashion, Lombard decided to have a bit of fun with Vera by claiming to be someone else just to confuse her.

Everyone is in purgatory.

There was either a huge seastorm on the way to Indian Island which knocked all the guests out of the boat and they all drowned, or a train derailment that killed the guests (in the case of Marston and Dr. Armstrong, perhaps they got into a car crash). The so-called "Indian Island" is in fact purgatory where each of the guests must confess to their mortal sins and acknowledge them as murder to either themselves or to the other guests before ascending to heaven (if this is the case, then it would appear Anthony Marston and Emily Brent are going to hell). For that matter, the boatman at the beginning, and policemen at the end, are in purgatory as well; they just don't realize it. Where this places Wargrave's involvement, I have no idea.

Vera Claythorne and Shion Sonozaki are distantly related.

Think about it: They both resent the younger relatives of their boyfriends because of all the time the child takes up, both went insane when their loved ones disappeared, both consider suicide because they think it's what their loved one wants them to do, and both killed the younger relative they felt got in the way. Even if you take the Hate Plague into account, the insanity must be genetic. Perhaps Vera had a relative who married someone from Japan (either Oryou Sonozaki who just didn't want to admit she married a foreigner, or someone from Shion's father's side) which resulted in a permanent estrangement from Vera's family...and ultimately, the birth of Shion.

The Golden Witch Beatrice is the real culprit behind the events of the story.

It's the same basic premise for one matter—a group of people are gathered on an island and are killed off in accordance to a strange rhyme one by one. Or should I say, the same MO? Before Kinzo whisked Beatrice off to Rokkenjima, she whisked Philip Lombard off to the meta-world and played a game with him—a game where she claimed to have murdered all of the guests with magic and he had to disprove her story, much like her current game with Battler. When he finally managed to prove Wargrave was the real mastermind behind it, he rejected Beatrice as a love interest and escaped the meta-world to save Vera Claythorne and then marry her (hence, the ending of the play/1945 movie version). But then Kinzo came along and saved Beatrice from vanishing from existence all together by trapping her in a human body and taking her to another isolated island, beginning the cycle all over again...

Haruhi is the real murderer.

-or at least lives in the same universe. In this case, Haruhi thought it would be fun to see a real murder mystery. So she inadvertently created Wargrave. Even though he lived before her time. The letter in the bottle that he sends at the end was, in fact, found by Haruhi, and was part of what sparked her wish to see a murder mystery in "Remote Island Syndrome". The reason why the organization knew this was because they found the letter in Haruhi's possession, and put two and two together. At the end of the episode, when she realizes how scary the idea of a closed circle murder mystery is, she may have subconsciously resigns the letter as part of the book we know today, which in turn sparked the game and movies.

U.N. Owen was Flandre Scarlet.

• Obviously, Wargrave was just her fall guy.
  • But how? Canon states that she's NOT insane, is a shut in and is pretty chill.

The whole thing's a "Truman Show" Plot.

I mean, seriously. It makes perfect sense!

Lawrence Wargrave was Born Lucky.

Many of the discoveries of the other characters' crimes were discovered through pure luck, coincidence and being in the right place at the right time. Also, when he brought them all to the island, a storm came and happened, preventing them from leaving even if they were determined enough to try swimming across and preventing people from the mainland to come.

Additionally, after faking his death neither Lombard or Blore notice that there aren't any blood splatters where his brains should have been blown out, and Armstrong doesn't figure out that he's next on the list despite the next verse being "A red herring swallowed one". His confession letter, which he would have wanted found so people would have known that he would have made what was probably the crime of the century, was found against all odds despite having been thrown as sea. Really, what are the chances of that happening? Wargrave must have been one of the luckiest people on the planet.

What's more, the last two deaths were purely Wargrave's luck. What if Vera hadn't managed to steal the gun? What if Lombard had killed her? Wargrave wouldn't have had a single chance against Lombard – a strong man with a revolver. Or what if Lombard and Vera had realized neither of them could be the murderer? What if, after all, Armstrong's body was never washed out/never noticed?

• Lots of valid points here, but some contentious ones as well. As for Wargrave vs. Lombard - I still bet on the former because of surprise factor (Lombard, like Vera, wouldn't know that not everybody was dead). Of course, there would be no nooses in the rooms - just surprise attack (possibly even in the fasion of Blore's murder) and then hanging of unconscious body. And for Lombard and Vera to come to conclusion that no one of them could be the murderer seems rather outstretched, given all the conditions (note that they couldn't possibly be Genre Savvy as this book was practically a Trope Maker). Armstrong's body was pure luck - but the situation where already not quite sane Vera after some time steals the gun and shoots Lombard "just in case" wasn't unimaginable (though in that case it is doubtful she would return to the house where Armstrong could still lurk).
  • We don't know what caliber of revolver Lombard has in the novel. We just know he has a revolver. A smaller caliber revolver isn't going to blast through Wargrave's skull entirely. And the skull is pretty thick. It would be natural for Lombard and Blore to potentially speculate that Wargrave was shot at a distance, which would create an entrance wound in Wargrave's head, but not an exit wound. It was also fairly dark, and Armstrong kept the others from getting too close to Wargrave's body. When they took him to his room, you can bet Armstrong positioned himself at Wargrave's head and shoulders and carried him up. As for the discovery of the characters crimes, it wasn't luck. It was dogged determination. In Wargrave's confession letter, he said he adopted a line of questioning that he asked EVERYONE he started a conversation with. He kept up the line of questioning over and over again until he finally had used it on enough people to gather nine victims. The 10th was always going to be Morris, for Wargrave's personal reasons. As for the letter he tosses into the sea, Wargrave didn't care THAT much whether or not his crime was solved, and he did even say in the letter that it was possible the police figured it out already. Wargrave simply filled out the letter and tossed it into the sea to give the authorities a chance to figure out it was him that killed everyone and "see how clever he'd been" should the letter be found. He even admits he's leaving it purely to chance by putting the letter in a bottle. While he'd like glory for being the mastermind of it all, if he's never found out, he doesn't mind that outcome either.

For all ten, their response to the record was a matter of damnation or a last chance at redemption.

We don't know what Mrs. Rogers chose; we don't hear from her again after she fainted. Sadly, the other nine obviously chose to double down.

Armstrong was originally going to be the third victim.

Part of Wargrave's plan was to kill the "lesser" criminals first and leave the worst ones for the end. Yet Armstrong's crime wasn't really that different from Marston's, and Marston was chosen as the first victim. Both were criminally irresponsible and murdered people by accident. Armstrong's crime was worse, but he wasn't nearly as heartless as Miss Brent or Rogers.

The General, on the other hand, essentially betrayed one of his own men and sent him to die while knowing full well what he was doing. The General's crime was almost as cruel as Blore's or Lombard's if you think about it.

So Wargrave was originally planning to kill Dr. Armstrong early on, and leave the General as one of the last to die. What made him change his mind? The way the two men reacted to the accusations, of course. Armstrong was so dismissive he pretended to not even remember the patient, which might have left a bad impression. We know it wasn't true and he did feel guilty, but Wargrave might not have realized that. Meanwhile, the General was so clearly plagued with guilt that it would be pointless to torment him any further. Having realized this, Wargrave decided to kill the General right after Mrs. Rogers and leave the doctor for much later.

Additionally, there was also a pragmatic reason for doing that, as Wargrave mentions in his message that he was at this point considering which person he should try to win over as an ally, and having the doctor on his side when he was planning to fake his death would make the job much easier, so, there's that too.

---