If you haven’t read the novel And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie but wish to in the future stop reading beyond this point.
If like Judge Lawrence Wargrave you collected information on various people who had taken the lives of other people would you do justice by luring them and then killing them? You have firm proof that they are guilty however due to various reasons the courts will not convict them. The murderers are all very unrepentant. They will as I’ve said will not be punished in any other way. As you have a terminal illness and cover up the evidence you will not be arrested or tried or punished. So again would you bring justice to the murderers?
Heck, just blow up their boat on the way to the island. The lengths he goes to to string out one death after another was far too reliant on luck and serendipity…
No. Especially if I were a judge. Living a life in the legal system but throwing it aside because I rejected some of its mistaken decisions would be particularly wrong. It’s one thing to kill people if you are a killer and never embraced law and the social contract, but another to use it as a shield to hurt people you have personal convictions about what they did. Dick Cheney and his hired assassins are utterly safe from me.
Well that’s what happens in the book. Also a lot of the murderers are indirect murderers for example a person who drives her servant to suicide or a man who runs over two kids with a car.
If I were dying, I’d have nothing to do with murderers. Same as if I were not dying.
Half the murderers go free, because half the murders are never solved all the way through conviction. That’s a lot of avenging to take on. In my county there’s one un-resolved murder every two days.
If I managed to make the boat explosion an air-tight accident, maybe yes, but the problem with “perfect crimes” is that they are ever-so-rarely perfect. Some cop, who had been following some of the cases and their suspects, would put 2+2+quite-a-few-others together and come knocking on the nearest door, mine. :mad:
Better to knock them off individually, especially if the CODs were easily explained as “natural causes.” I’d write it, but I’m a dreadful writer and I don’t doubt that many people have done it already.
So was Christie, as anyone who has read Marsh knows. Go ahead and write it.
In answer to the OP: No. Capital punishment is wrong always and everywhere. If I felt compelled to appoint myself the Fury to these people, I’d find a way to do it that served my sense of justice a lot better (if only because they would be able to experience it for longer). But it’s also unlikely that I would feel compelled to appoint myself to that position.
Curtis, you do realize you’re asking us “would you like to be Dexter Morgan, given half a chance and some excuse or other” ? And that you answer that question with a resounding yes ?
It’s the exact plot of *And Then There Were None *. It’s only very similar to Dexter. Dexter Morgan isn’t terminally ill, for instance. I thought it was abundently clear in both works of fiction that the murderer was a sociopath and that their murders were unjust.
He wanted to torture them as well…Remember he says that the ones he killed off first were somewhat less reprehensible…the drunk driver and the wife who was under the influence of her husband. He seemed to think Vera’s crime was worst (maybe becuase the victim was a child) and he “killed” her last…
By the way, most of the movies have the last two people survive at the end. Vera’s “murder” is made out to be a real accident, and there is a guy who was not a murderer but posing as a friend who had recently commited suicide… Is that in the original novel?
Thanks, I knew there were two versions of the novel. The earlier one was called 'Ten little Indians" or something even less PC. I was wondering if the film adaptations took that ending from the original novel.
Err, yes, I know - I read 10 Little Niggers as a kid.
My point was that, if **Curtis **hadn’t noticed that Judge Wargrave was a criminally insane sociopath (hasn’t he read the last chapter ?), then a comparison with another fictional character would maybe work, especially if that second character isn’t merely portrayed as a criminally insane sociopath, but plainly spelled out as such. It says Dexter is kah-rayzee right on the tin, as it were.
I wouldn’t enjoy killing them, laughing like a maniac but if I were going to die anyway I would attempt to impose some justice since I have sufficent proof that they’re murderers.