History Headscratchers / AndThenThereWereNone

** To be fair, I'm not entire sure Wargrave predicted anything about who ended up being last to die (at least not in a concrete "here is my exact list of the strict order in which I am predicting that everyone will die with 100% unshakeable certainty" sense). He ''personally'' thinks Vera was the worst and deserved it more, but ultimately there's not exactly a yawning moral chasm between what Vera and Lombard did, so he probably wouldn't have been ''too'' bothered if it ended up being Lombard. He just personally thought it would have been more appropriate to be Vera.

** ''Ten Little Yidies'', ''Ten Little Jhonnies (19th centriy Chinese immigrant in Britain)'', there's a variation of any race if you want to find one. Seriously.
*** Actually, I was refering to the first one, it's just that in Soviet Russia the name of the novel was completely deprived of any derogatory undertone and sounds like "Ten little negroes". I saw the name written like this in the Web and assumed it was like this initially. I couldn't imagine that they would feature a derogatory variant of the word in the name of a book for no reason.

*** Actually, I was refering to the first one, it's just that in Soviet Russia the name of the novel was completely deprieved of any derogatory undertone and sounds like "Ten little negroes". I saw the name written like this in the Web and assumed it was like this initially. I couldn't imagine that they would feature a derogatory variant of the word in the name of a book for no reason.

*** What is true in US is not true in the rest of the world. At last in Latin America the term 'negro' is fairly acceptable one (not "politically correct", but not derogatory either. I don't know how things went in Russia, but in Brazil the name change(at 2008) was considered unnecessary.

** Even if there'd been a last survivor, [[TheBadGuyWins Wargrave might still]] [[XanatosGambit have gotten his way]]. Whomever was left behind on the island would naturally be blamed for the murders, and hanged for them. Technically that wouldn't match the poem's suicide, but JediTruth could always claim that they'd put themselves into the noose by committing their original crime, and then coming to the island in the first place!
** No, Christie changed the ending to all of her books adapted to plays in which the killer escapes in the book. Best example is Witness for the Prosecution, where she changed the ending.

*** It doesn't mean that the diaries ''didn't'' say he was murdered in the parlor - it only means that he will be found in the bed where he's supposed to be when everything's over. Actually, given how the police are not too brilliant in Agatha Christie's books, to put it mildly, I see no problem at all with suggestion that they just missed the significance of this detail. Also, to put a question in the manner of "why the police didn't get evidence of what really happened from the victims' diaries" suggests that the solution should be obvious to an attentive reader of the novel even prior to the reveal, which is hardly the case. That said, we have no proof that the police really lack the evidence (as opposed to the skills to interpret it); for all we know, for the events up to and including Wargrave's murder the police might have learnt from the diaries the same important facts about what had happened on the Negro Island as a reader of the novel.

*** It doesn't mean that the diaries ''didn't'' say he was murdered in the parlor - it only means that he will be found in the bed where he's supposed to be when everything's over. Actually, given how the police are not too brilliant in Agatha Christie's books, to put it mildly, I see no problem at all with suggestion that they just missed the significance of this detail. Also, no, we're not "essentially asking why the police didn't get evidence of what really happened from the victims' diaries" because we have no proof that the police really lack the evidence (as opposed to the skills to interpret it); for all we know, for the events up to and including Wargrave's murder the police might have learnt from the diaries the same important facts about what had happened on the Negro Island as a reader of the novel.

*** It doesn't mean that the diaries ''didn't'' say he was murdered in the parlor - it only means that he will be found in the bed where he's supposed to be when everything's over. Actually, given how the police are not too brilliant in Agatha Christie's books, to put it mildly, I see no problem at all with suggestion that they just missed the significance of this detail. Also, no, we're not "essentially asking why the police didn't get evidence of what really happened from the victims' diaries" because we have no proof that the police really lacks the evidence (as opposed to the skills to interpret it); for all we know, for the events up to and including Wargrave's murder the police might have learnt from the diaries the same important facts about what had happened on the Negro Island as a reader of the novel.

** One could add that it also relies on the gun still being in a workable condition and with at least one more bullet inside after those three kill each other. Otherwise Wargrave will probably become the primary suspect as the cause of his death won't match with the written evidence. He could muddle the things by destroying all the diaries and notes, but it would actually move the mystery from "how on earth could it be done?" category to "well, most likely one of these killed everybody else and then committed suicude - we just don't know who exactly it was". [[FridgeBrilliance Which actually means that his plan relied on one more thing - that at least one of those who "outlived" him kept some notes on the case. If so, he probably counted on Blore doing that, the latter being an experienced policeman.]]

*** It doesn't mean that the diaries ''didn't'' say he was murdered in the parlor - it only means that he will be found in the bed where he's supposed to be when everything's over. Actually, given how the police are not too brilliant in Agatha Christie's books, to put it mildly, I see no problem at all with suggestion that they just missed the significance of this detail.

*** This whole conversation about diaries seems a bit circular and redundant. We're essentially asking why the police didn't get evidence of what really happened from the victims' diaries. Clearly the answer is that the victims, for whatever reason, didn't include anything that was especially helpful to the police about what happened in their diaries (likely because they were all a bit preoccupied with the whole "trying to survive on an isolated island with a killer hunting them down" situation to keep up with their journalling, hardly that unreasonable under the circumstances). If they had, the police would have used it to figure out what really happened; they didn't, so they didn't. QED.

** To be fair, I'm not entire sure Wargrave predicted anything about who ended up being last to die (at least not in a concrete "here is my exact list of the strict order in which I am predicting that everyone will die" sense). He ''personally'' thinks Vera was the worst and deserved it more, but ultimately there's not exactly a yawning moral chasm between what Vera and Lombard did, so he probably wouldn't have been ''too'' bothered if it ended up being Lombard. He just personally thought it would have been more appropriate to be Vera.

** The nursery rhyme is just a little thematic colour that Wargrave (and by extension Christie) is applying to the situation because he finds some of the broad similarities amusing. It's not intended to be a set-in-stone blueprint which cannot be deviated from.

*** They weren't * that* ignorant. Head wounds bleed profusely, people have known that as long as there have been head wounds. All of Wargrave's blood would have been pooled on the bed and none where he was allegedly murdered.

*** Besides, Lombard's no fool: he's perfectly aware of the Hostile Suspicion Chain described above and understands that his words matter little at this point.

** While there is a certain degree of ContrivedCoincidence owing to the fact that he probably couldn't predict the exact weather on the exact days his plot was going into action, he could nevertheless make an educated guess simply by consulting an almanac that outlined what the seasonal weather and seas were likely to be like in that particular area. He simply chooses a time of year which is more likely than not to see rough weather and seas that would make it difficult for a party from the land to travel to Soldier Island. He just happened to get lucky (in part due to AnthropicPrinciple; if it didn't happen, there'd be no story).

** To be fair, I'm not entire sure Wargrave predicted anything about who ended up being last to die. He ''personally'' thinks Vera was the worst and deserved it more, but ultimately there's not exactly a yawning moral chasm between what Vera and Lombard did, so he probably wouldn't have been ''too'' bothered if it ended up being Lombard. He just personally thought it would have been more appropriate to be Vera.