Thriller Spotlight with Joel C. Rosenberg

If you have kept up with the latest Marvel Avengers movies, then you are fully aware of the entertainment industry’s obsession with “bigger and better.” Each new release is filled with more action, greater explosions, and computer-generated imagery (CGI) that is so good you find yourself believing we just might be living in a multiverse. This fixation with always having to outdo the previous is one of the reasons that I often love to look backward when it comes to getting my entertainment fix.

The original Star Wars was a generation-changing film. My dad took me on opening weekend when I was ten years old and I was mesmerized. What George Lucas was able to pull off back in 1977 with $11 million and his band of geniuses at Industrial Light & Magic is still spawning spin-offs and television series at a remarkable rate more than forty-five years later.

And has there been a summer suspense blockbuster better than Jaws? The movie poster shows a giant shark, yet Steven Spielberg let us go for an hour and twenty-one minutes before he actually showed us that terrifying great white shark. Brilliant!

Great storytellers don’t necessarily need the biggest and best special effects—they need a big idea and clever, even genius, twists and turns.

The fascination with “bigger and better” can find its way into book series, too. There have been occasions when I have had to remind myself that my goal is not to somehow outdo my previous book with higher death counts and bigger explosions. My mission has to be to write a great story that a reader can get completely lost in. Look at some of the great writers of the past. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle could have Sherlock Holmes take on a new case, suffer great personal peril, then crack the puzzle and reveal the perpetrator in less time than it takes to brew a pot of tea and butter a scone.

But the grande dame of the old-school suspense genre is the incomparable Agatha Christie. I have read at least a dozen of her mystery novels but have so many more to go—she wrote sixty-six of them! I’ve also watched numerous film adaptations of her work, which, quite honestly, never quite live up to the book. Guinness World Records has named Christie the top-selling novelist of all time with—wait for it; that’s right—more than two billion copies sold. Two billion! While it’s difficult to pick a favorite to put in this month’s spotlight, if pushed, I would have to choose And Then There Were None.

The story opens with the musings of Mr. Justice Wargrave as he puffs his cigar while reading The Times in the first-class car of a train bound for Devon. Meanwhile, back in third class sits a very nervous Vera Claythorne fretting about the new secretarial post she is traveling to fill. What do these two strangers have in common? They have both been invited to spend some days at a recently refurbished mansion on a small rocky island off the coast of southern England.

Eventually the reader is introduced to six more guests, and once the visitors reach the island, they meet the butler and his wife, the housekeeper. That evening, tragedy strikes. One of the guests falls over dead in front of the horrified onlookers. But he is just the first. Soon it becomes evident that everyone on the island is a target for assassination, and the cold-blooded murderer is one of them.

Christie’s perfect literary timing keeps the tension high throughout. Tying each new dead body to a corresponding verse in an old children’s counting song is masterfully done. At the end, when the killer is finally revealed, you’ll find yourself wanting to reread the story just so you can pick up all the little clues that Dame Christie left behind.

If that plot sounds vaguely familiar to you, it’s because it has been used, modified, and reused throughout film history. Neil Simon owes Christie a debt of gratitude for his 1976 movie, Murder by Death, as does Rian Johnson for his 2022 Netflix movie, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which I just watched with my wife and really enjoyed.

There is no flash and very little bang in Christie’s classic And Then There Were None, but there is complexity, intricacy, and enough suspense to have you checking the locks on your doors a second time before you go to bed. If you haven’t read her work before, what’s wrong with you? Agatha Christie is the master and she has so much to teach us.

—Joel C. Rosenberg