The Nice House on the Left
A collection of people, sometimes friends, sometimes strangers, forced together under some circumstance or another has been a major theme in entertainment for ages. Commonly understood as “ten little murder victims” (Tropes, 2024), this setup has been examined forwards and backward, it’s been inverted, subverted, converted, and pretty much any other –verted one can think of. This theme has been used in literature (fig. 1), film (figs. 2, 3, 4), and even board games (fig. 4). Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5 The most famous version of this trope is, of course, Agatha Christie’s seminal novel And Then There Were None , a story of ten people brought together via invitation who are then methodically picked off one by one, until (as the title states) none of the invitees are left breathing. Both Murder by Death , and Id...