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This trope's page is under discussion here . Your considered opinions would be appreciated. Thank you for your contributions and have a nice day.
A group of people are invited to attend a get-together by a mysterious host. Suddenly one of the guests is murdered and circumstances prevent the others from leaving (usually a heavy storm).
Accusations are hurled, secrets are uncovered and more murders are committed as the dwindling party tries to determine who is the murderer in their midst.
Named after the 1939 Agatha Christie novel also known as Ten Little Niggers Ten Little Indians And Then There Were None.
Sometimes overlaps with Whack A Mole, and is often the modus operandi in a Reunion Revenge. If the writers are really bloodthirsty, it only ends when they Kill Em All (or, if you're at the beginning of the series, Everybodys Dead Dave); if they're feeling devious, they may also throw in a few instances of Acquitted Too Late.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
Board Games
- The entire premise of the board game Clue, as well as The Movie based on it. The film involved a group of guests with questionable pasts being locked inside a mansion trying to figure out who killed Mr. Boddy. Every single one of them had a motive to kill him, and things aren't helped when the rest of the mansion's staff begins falling like flies...
- Parodied in the board game Kill Doctor Lucky, by Cheapass games, the objective of which is to be the first to bump off the good Doctor. The players all despise Doctor Lucky, and have been invited to his country mansion for the weekend. In the words of the game "There's a howling storm outside, it's midnight, and someone just shut off the lights..."
Comic Books
- Parodied / subverted in a Doctor Who Magazine comic strip, in which a group of minor villains that the Doctor has previously defeated gather together in a deserted space-station to plan a final attack that will finish him once and for all. One of them dies horribly, and as the others begin dying one by one afterward, it seems (to them, anyway) as if the Doctor has infiltrated their midst in disguise and is picking them off one by one. Finally, the last couple — paranoid that either one of them could be the Doctor in disguise — kill each other... and at that point, the Doctor arrives, not recognising any of them. Turns out the first death was just an accident with a faulty machine and the other deaths were just everyone picking each other off out of sheer paranoia.
- Played fairly straight in an earlier DWM strip, 'Tooth and Claw' (from 1997, long before the TV episode).
Fanfiction
- This trope is the most popular mystery outline for any fanfiction category (there are even fanfictions under the trope namer's category using original characters for the plot) thus making any possibility of listing all examples ludicrous.
Film
- Murder By Death is the Affectionate Parody of the genre; here, the guests are thinly-disguised versions of famous fictional detectives.
- Alien 3, which has been described as "And Then There Were None in outer space" by Entertainment Weekly, had the entire population of Fiorina 'Fury' 161, save for one prisoner (Morse), killed off by the xenomorph that had infiltrated the prison. This includes Ellen Ripley herself, who died as a combined result of the chestbursting chewing its way out of her, and a suicide dive into the prison's metalworks.
- Homaged in the movie Identity, with a twist: The guests being murdered are the alternate personalities of a mental patient.
- The movie Mindhunters is And Then There Were None with FBI profilers on a training exercise.
- April Fool's Day. Or is it?
- By the end of The Ladykillers, the robbers have all killed one another except the Professor, who is struck on the head by a railway semaphore. Little Mrs Wilberforce is left with all the "lolly".
- The film adaptation of Clue was essentially a gigantic parody of this trope.
- The Bollywood movie Gumnaam is an uncredited remake of And Then There Were None.
Literature
- The Strugatsky Brothers' Hotel of the dead alpinist seems to start this way... and then things get weird.
- The novel The Man Who Tried To Get Away by Stephen Donaldson is one big heavily lampshaded exercise in the trope. Private eye Brew Axbrewder is running short on cash and needs to lie low after treading on the toes of a local crime boss, so he reluctantly agrees to be a consultant and participant for a murder mystery vacation in a lodge out in the woods. He (predictably) hates every minute of the contrived And Then There Were None event, right up until one of the participants gets killed for real. And someone has cut the phone lines. On a blizzard has blocked the only road back to town. Axbrewder and his partner assume that the crime boss has found out where he is and sent someone to take out Axbrewder and kill all the witnesses, but he's only half right. The crime boss does have a hitman at the event (the maintenance man, who gets sent out to try and walk back to town, turns out to be working for him), but neither our hero or the detective know that two of the guests are actually violent psychopaths who booked into this vacation for kicks, and it's they rather than the hitman who kill most of the other guests.
- Parodied in Anthony Horowitz's novella I Know What You Did Last Wednesday.
- Played with in the teen horror novel Class Trip by Bebe Faas Rice. The And Then There Were None plot is related in first person by one of the characters. Eventually there's just two of them left, and the police are on the way. The narrator then reveals that ''she'' was the killer all along, kills the last remaining other character and turns on the tears when the police arrive...
- The book and movie version of The Ruins has this trope as a central plot point. In the book, all of the characters are killed by a man eating, parastic vine.
- Several of Simon R Green's Hawk And Fisher stories.
- A variation happens in Murder on the Leviathan, which was intended as a tribute to Agatha Christie; what makes it unusual is that this situation came about when a detective looking for a murderer on a luxury liner had his chief suspects assigned rooms in the same salon. And then one of them was killed.
Live Action TV
- The Adventures Of Brisco County Jr. ("Bounty Hunters Convention")
- The Facts Of Life parodied the trope by having the victims killed in silly ways (Blair was killed by over-using hair spray, Natalie was strangled with a pair of fuzzy dice). In the end, it turned out to be All Just A Dream (a Dream Within A Dream, in fact).
- Get Smart ("Hoo Done It")
- Remington Steele had at least one of these, with Steele of course referencing And Then There Were None and its signature plot twist: the sixth person to 'die' faked his death and was actually the murderer.
- Funny Subversion: Homicide Life On The Street once had a murder at an exclusive country club, that appeared to be one of these. After a Christiesque setup and a cutaway, the BPD detectives had the case closed by the commercial break.
- Harpers Island.
- Stargate SG-1 features such an episode, only instead of a building, they are all stuck on the Alpha Site planet and unable to leave until the murderer is found. Tensions mount between the three races present, with the leaders under a lot of pressure to keep it from turning into a shootout. Accusations are flung around and the humans are stuck in the middle. The murderer turns out to be an invisible Ashrak, but the relationship between Earth and its two allies never quite recovers.
- The Wild Wild West episodes "The Night of the Tottering Tontine" and "The Night of the Bleak Island".
- The Avengers episode "The Superlative Seven".
- An episode of CSI has the forensic team trying to locate a gang of casino robbers. The CSIs find that each gang member was killed by one of his or her partners, and end up following a trail of dead bodies to the last surviving robber.
- Played with in an episode of Highlander where Hugh Fitzcairn is killed and any one of his half a dozen or so houseguests could have done it. However, as he is immortal, he revives and spends the rest of the episode annoying MacLeod, who is trying to find the murderer without giving away the fact that he's still alive.
- Doctor Who
- "The Unicorn and the Wasp", which has Agatha Christie as a character.
- The "Terror of the Vervoids" segment of "The Trial of a Time Lord" serial of the original series.
- Due to the Clip Show style of the story, the Doctor at the beginning of the story even got to say the line "One of them will become a murderer." Although as Colin Baker pointed out in the DVD commentary they all attempt murder, if not all sucessfully — even the Doctor but he puts that down to tampered evidence.
- Parodied in The Goodies episode "Daylight Robbery on the Orient Express".
- Mathnet (from Square One TV) did an episode like this that was both a parody (the villain turned out to be a court stenographer) and an homage.
Party Games
- Mafia style games often run into this, as the towns objective is to hunt out the mafia from their midst. Many is the game where a last lynch leaves two town players, or a last kill means the sole surviving mafia member.
Role Playing Games
- The World Of Darkness series is somewhat notorious for setting up this trope ad nauseum. Any time a vampire hosts a party, you can guarantee he's going to be dead by the end of the night.
Theater
- The Mousetrap, also by Christie, did this, in which the characters were guests at a hotel trapped due to a snow storm.
- There is also a stage adaptation of And Then There Were None, also penned by Christie.
Video Games
- Parodied in the Dark Brotherhood mission 'Whuddonit?' in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion where the NPCs don't know you are the murderer, hired by the mansion owner to help him get revenge on them. You actually get a bonus if you manage to kill them all without anybody discovering that YOU are the killer.
- For the fun of it, you can actually convince some of the NPC's to kill each other
- This is the premise of the amateur adventure video game 5 Days a Stranger (part one in the Chzo Mythos / John De Foe Quadrology series by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw): 5 people from different walks of life are lured into a house, one by one, and become trapped. Pretty soon they start dying. Each and every one of the five is a suspect, including the protagonist.
- That is actually the name of a map extension in Makai Kingdom
- The game Seven Noble Kinsmen has seven Shakespearean actors plus the player character, a theatre critic who ruined the actors' careers, invited to an isolated mansion/theatre by a mysterious host who never shows up. Of course, then people start dying off...
- Interesting in that the murderer changes with each game play (the clues to his/her identity are also changed).
- This is the premise of the online roleplaying game Mitadake High. Except in high school.
- Murder Mansion, too, complete with above-mentioned heavy storm.
- There is actually a song in Mother 3 with this name; it plays when you visit Tazmily for the last time, when pretty much everyone else has already left the town.
- The Point-And-click computer game The 7th Guest uses this as a base premise - with a twist. A mad toymaker lures guests into a house he built and makes them solve riddles. If they solve all of them, they'll get whatever they most desire. Unfortunately, these wishes either have an ironic twist - and that's only if the guest themself doesn't expire in the course of the game. Thing is, he only lured six people into the house. The seventh guest? A little boy who turns out to be you - and you were Dead All Along.
- This is the premise of the PC adventure game The Colonel's Bequest and its sequal The Dagger of Amon Ra. The first game takes place on an old plantation in 1920s New Orleans where the protagonist Laura Bow's friend has invited her to stay with her family, who have gathered to hear the old Colonel's will. Then people start dying, and you are forced to collect clues to try and figure out who killed who, and why. The second game takes place in a museum following a robbery, and one by one everyone inside starts getting bumped off. In both games it is up to the player to figure out just what is going on, and if you get it wrong you will get the bad ending and let the murderer escape, perhaps at the cost of your own life.
- Touhou has this as the name of one of Flandre Scarlet's spellcards. Judging from the games, ZUN was apparently a big fan of the books, with songs being named U.N.Owen was her? and Whodunnit?, along with Alice Margatroid and Letty Whiterock being Shout Out to two characters in A Murder is Announced (Miss Murgatroyd and Lettie Blacklock, respectably). Fittingly enough, one of the major enemies in that game has a tendency to give her spell cards macabre names such as Killing Doll, and Clock Corpse, and has a knife set named Jack the Ripper.
Western Animation
- Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends: In "Seven Little Superheroes," the Chameleon invites Spider-Man, Iceman, Firestar, Captain America, Doctor Strange, Namor the Sub-Mariner, and Shanna the She-Devil to an island where they are trapped by a forcefield and targeted one at a time. The episode's name even reflects the alternate name of the novel. Too bad Aunt May's puppy sneaks in and then ecomes a Spanner In The Works, since she acts as an Evil Detecting Dog...
- A Futurama episode, "Anthology of Interest I" features a story entitled "Dial L For Leela" that features this.
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