And Then There Were None Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Ralph Partridge

Critical Essay by Ralph Partridge

[It is no use trying to compare Mrs. Christie] with other writers of detection. She stands hors concours, in a class of her own. No one else in the world would have attempted seriously to manipulate a plot like that of Ten Little Niggers without a hopeless presentiment of failure…. Mrs. Christie disdains contraptions. She faces her readers with her bare hands and her sleeves rolled up; and she sells them ten dummies beautifully, one after the other, with the exquisite timing of a Rugby International three-quarter going through a pack of clumsy yokels to score a try under the posts…. There are ten people cooped up on Nigger Island who put on a gramophone record and hear their death-sentence. After sentence has been executed Scotland Yard asks "Who did it?" But only Mrs. Christie survives to tell. Apart from one little dubious proceeding there is no cheating; the reader...
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