I suffer from a recurring itch to dig into the history of . I can fill in that blank with “fictional occult detectives” or “actual ghost hunters” or, well, almost anything else. This itch began to twitch again — if, indeed, an itch does twitch — when I learned my local community theater will perform a stage adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel And Then There Were None. It’s among the author’s most popular works, but it’s also unusual. Ten people answer invitations to come to an isolated house on an isolated island. One by one, they are found murdered, and the surviving guests deduce that the culprit must be among them. The plot doesn’t fit with the traditional mystery, which spotlights a detective methodically solving a crime in the manner of, let’s say, Christie’s Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot. Instead, And Then There Were None seems to fit better into the “old dark house” subgenre.
Looking into earlier examples of old dark house works, I came upon a 1934 movie called The Ninth Guest. You can find it at the Internet Archive. It’s a fun, offbeat film, probably improved by being fairly short — barely over an hour — and by its interesting parallels to Christie’s novel. It’s based on a 1930 novel, titled The Invisible Host and written by Bruce Manning and Gwen Bristow, which has been cited as possible inspiration for Christie. Both open with a cast of characters gathering in a spot from which they can’t escape, next a disembodied voice informs them they’re going to pay for their crimes, and then there’s a series of carefully timed deaths. The notion that Manning and Bristow influenced Christie has weight, though I confess I say this having only seen the movie.
Traveling further back in time, I came upon another contender. It’s Anna Katherine Green’s 1905 novella The House in the Mist. Green is a very important figure in mystery history. Her Ebenezer Gryce was a bestselling series detective before Sherlock Holmes appeared, and she is frequently named as one of Christie’s influences. Like The Ninth Guest and And Then There Were None, this tale involves yet another circle of scoundrels coming together and, well, you can guess the general drift of what happens to them. All I’ll say is the pacing of Green’s novella is very different from the 1930 and 1939 novels, but we’re in similar extracting-wholesale-justice territory. All three mysteries involve a murderer who’s hidden in plain sight, and all three lack some smarty-pants detective getting in the way.
It might be impossible to determine if Christie, while pondering And Then There Were None, gave any thought to how she might put her own spin on Green’s mystery of over three decades earlier. Certainly, the younger author was familiar with the spooky tunnel of mystery fiction that takes readers to an old dark house. Such works were especially popular on the stage and on the silent screen in the 1920s. Think of Mary Robert Rinehart and Avery Hopwood’s 1920 play The Bat, adapted from Rinehart’s 1908 novel The Circular Staircase, or John Willard’s 1922 play The Cat and the Canary. Both have been put on film repeatedly. J.B. Priestley’s 1927 novel Benighted led to the 1932 movie The Old Dark House, which gave the subgenre a name.
But was that when the subgenre budded, as some suggest, or when it blossomed? Can we trace things back to works published even before Rinehart’s novel? Green’s The House in the Mist employs at least three basic elements that those later examples latched onto tightly: crappy weather, the well-attended reading of a will, and a house with secret passageways. To be sure, the “tangled hedges” surrounding the “long, low building” that serves as Green’s title dwelling foreshadow the gnarly evils of the lowly guests who assemble there. The setting, in other words, is a dark house, though perhaps not quite yet an old one.
On a related note, it’s entirely possible that I’ve started a new research project. After all, when an itch starts to twitch…
— Tim
BROM BONES BOOKS 