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"Do not doubt me, my friends; you shall all be dead before morning." New Orleans, 1930. Eight guests are invited to a party at a luxurious penthouse apartment, yet on arrival it turns out that no one knows who their mysterious host actually is. The latter does not openly appear, but instead communicates with the guests by radio broadcast. What he has to tell his guests is chilling: that every hour, one of them will die. Despite putting the guests on their guard, the Host's prophecy starts to come horribly true, each demise occurring in bizarre fashion. As the dwindling band of survivors grows increasingly tense, their confessions to each other might explain why they have been chosen for this macabre evening-and invoke the nightmarish thought that the mysterious Host is one of them. The burning question becomes: will any of the party survive, including the Host . . . ? The Invisible Host (1930) established one of the best-loved and most durable forms in classic mystery fiction. It was famously to reappear in Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None (1939). How much Christie's novel is indebted to its predecessor is open to conjecture (and the subject is discussed in our new introduction, by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans). Whatever the verdict, readers will delight in The Invisible Host, an innovative and most unusual mystery from the golden age of crime fiction. It was adapted into a play, and a Hollywood movie as The Ninth Guest (1934).… (more)
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As each hour passes the guests begin to die. (The deaths are all quick and ungruesome.)
This is not an 'idiot plot', the survivors quickly think of banding together and trying to locate the killer -- but their host is one step ahead.
This book is a quick and entertaining read (although I found myself wishing that all parts of it were equally clever). The 1930 hardcover Mystery League edition has short previews of several other Mystery League titles at the back of the book.
(Basis for the Broadway play and movie _The Ninth Guest_.)
-Lisa Shapte
In New Orleans in 1930, 8 guest, all well-heeled and well known in society are invited to a
They are met by a butler who says he does not know who the host is, that he has his instructions, and among those is to turn on the radio, and that their host will communicate with them via it during the evening. Through the radio the host tells them they are all scheduled to die before morning, and that they are taking part in a competition in which he will outwit each one of them. And so the plot proceeds.
I didn't actually know of the existence of this book, nor of the possibility that Agatha Christie plagiarised the main plot. We don't know now, and can't ask, if Agatha Christie had read the book, but to me, if she had, there is no surprise in the possibility that she said something like "What an interesting plot - but I can do better than that". That is actually a situation that we come across quite often in crime fiction - where an author seems to have taken a plot that someone else has used, and seemingly tried to do better or produce a variation.
There are many differences between THE INVISIBLE HOST and AND THEN THERE WERE NONE but I will let you discover them for yourself. I'm not sure that I agree that in the former the guests were in a competition with the host - if they were, the rules were never made clear.