Why Didn't They Ask Evans?
I just finished reading this book and I liked it a lot. Part of the solution was so unexpected and the title of the book posed a very interesting problem! I found this to be very much in the vein of a Tommy and Tuppence book, and when I watched the movie from the 1980's and it had Francesca Annis and James Warwick as Frankie and Bobby, I had to keep checking myself. All in all, I thought the novel was very well written, and I thought AC connected seemingly unconnected events very intelligently. My only problem being that maybe there were too few characters who could have been the culprits. How would you rate Why Didn't They Ask Evans?
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BRAVO!
You have found the ninth little soldier boy! You have proven yourself to be a true fan of Agatha Christie!
And Then There Were None has inspired a large number of parodies and pastiches. Something’s Afoot, a musical comedy, is a riff on ATTWN, featuring a character named Miss Tweed, who is reminiscent of Mrs. Ariadne Oliver and Margaret Rutherford’s take on Miss Marple. The big eleventh-hour song is “I Owe It All,” where Miss Tweed declares that she owes her detective skills to Agatha Christie.
The movies Clue and Neil Simon’s Murder by Death also contain inspirations from ATTWN, though their plots are far different from the novel. The playwright Fred Carmichael has written numerous mystery-comedy plays, including some parodies of ATTWN, such as Any Number Can Die, and Done to Death. In the latter, five mystery writers are sent to a creepy mansion on an island to create a new hit crime television drama, but their work is interrupted by a series of deaths.
The PBS educational television series Square One TV featured a daily segment called Mathnet, a serial police procedural where mathematician officers solved crimes over the course of five episodes. In the fifth season storyline “The Case of the Mystery Weekend,” George Frankly (Joe Howard) and Pat Tuesday (Toni DiBuono) visit an isolated mansion, expecting an innocent crime game, but the other six guests are each accused of crimes and vanish. The detectives solve the kidnappings by finding patterns and testing theories, thereby teaching children valuable problem-solving skills.
The 2009 CBS television series Harper’s Island was inspired in part by ATTWN and classic horror movies. In this thirteen-episode series, a large cast of characters is invited to an isolated island for a wedding party. Each episode, characters are killed in horrific ways, culminating in nearly thirty deaths. Each episode takes its name from a sound effect connected to a murder.
The animated series Family Guy featured a 2010 episode called “And Then There Were Fewer.” The main characters visit James Woods’ island mansion, and several recurring characters, including Woods (playing a parody of himself), are murdered and thereby written out of the series. Woods would later return to the show, claiming to have been saved by paramedics.
As expected, there is another word written on the statuette. “Marston.” By now, you should have a pretty shrewd idea as to who the Mystery Man is, but you’ll need tomorrow’s clue to confirm it!