Justice In And Then There Were None By Agatha Christie

The theme in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None is that the execution of crooked justice is not synonymous with the crime the perpetrator committed. This theme is introduced explicitly in the Manuscript, however it encompasses the whole book, so we will examine this theme as if it were introduced at the beginning. We will examine 3 characters; their severity of crime increasing as we go along.

The first character we will look at for this theme is Emily Brent. Emily gets one sentence about how Wargrave found her story, from a white married woman in Majorca. Her ‘crime’ is turning away her servant because she was pregnant, and that girl sadly killed herself in front of Emily. Emily stands out compared to the other people on Soldier

Rogers. It was hinted at and then declared by Justice Wargrave in the Manuscript that Mrs. Rogers acted under the influence of her husband, and therefore she had to die peacefully in her sleep. Objectively, her crime is letting one person die, effectively torturing a woman by stalling, not fighting against her husband, and not giving Jennifer Brady (their boss) a “restorative drug”. It is stated in the Manuscript that Mrs. and Mr. Rogers were expected to benefit from their boss’s death. Under the crooked view of justice by Justice Wargrave, Mrs. Rogers deserved to die for 2nd degree murder in favor of implied monetary gain. She would’ve already benefited from Jennifer’s death, considering they were not suspected by the law. Even though she was partially responsible for a death she benefitted from, she got to die peacefully in her sleep, never having to experience the torture the others go

In the Swan Song, he was accused of leaving 21 men from an East African tribe to die. Lawrence describes in the Manuscript that he heard Lombard’s story from a man who had just returned from the Amazon. Philip does not deny and embraces the accusation, saying it was an act of self preservation, saying that Indigenous people do not feel pain like Europeans do. Lombard never feels remorse for the mass murder he committed. He never shows any mental distress at the situation he’s in. Even at gunpoint, he thinks methodically and mechanically, weighing his options. He meets a swift fate, getting shot and killed instantly. He does make it to the final two, meaning that he lived long enough to go through the insanity that was Soldier Island, and does end up dead after suffering all those days. However, his death was near-instant, nothing like the starvation the Natives went through when he abandoned them. He had food at his disposal, a servant up until a point, and even the gun that ended his life. The Natives had no such luxury. Lombard’s death will never adequately bring the 21 men he killed any