1. 研究目的与意义（文献综述）

Agatha Christie, known as the “Queen of the Crime”, has been the best-selling novelist of all time and outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Numerous studies on her detective fiction have been conducted by scholars abroad and at home. Her works have been sold over a billion copies in English and translated into about 130 languages. Since the 1970s, a large number of liberal arts school have offered "detective fiction" as an optional course that teaches history, writing Techniques and the criticism of detective novels. Note on the Semiotic Analysis of Detective Novels：With Examples from the Novels of Agatha Christie and Agatha Christie：Investigating Femininity are two of the studied works by scholars overseas. Besides, P．D James, a famous English detective novelist who considered Agatha Christie as arch-breaker of rules, used large length to analyze Agatha Christie`s works in The Golden Age and Four Formidable Women. Being different from foreign countries, though Agatha Christie`s detective novels enjoys a widening circle of readers in China, their literary value has not been paid enough attention by scholars and literary critics. Agatha Christie mainly engaged in the creation of detective fiction while detective novels has always been classified as popular literature with a sense of entertainment. Thus academic works and dissertations of it are rare. Female Consciousness of Self-deprecating: Analysis On the Female Consciousness in Agatha Christie`s Detective Novels and Mirage and Labyrinth: Analysis On the Charm element of Agatha Christie`s Novels are two of the great works of this kind. However, the most famous one is Gorgeous Family: Agatha Christie`s World written by Wang Anyi, a novelist who has been influenced by Agatha Christie.

Arnold Bennett once said that the foundation of an excellent novel the the characterization. Character, which can be used to convey the emotions and feelings of the author, is the soul of a novel. In the literary works, the author can describe characters in many ways and from various perspectives. A variety of techniques can be used in language description, action description, psychological description and environmental description to show not only the appearance, clothing, manners and other external forms of a figure, but also the thoughts and feelings and other internal activities, so as to shape the full and successful characters. In a novel, the essence of social life can be represented by analyzing the characters, so does the theme of the work. However, in order to make a judgment of the character`s inner world, one must have a thorough and analysis on the novelist's character delineation. The author of this paper tries to analyze the identity and motivation of Lawrence Wargrave, the main character in And Then There Were None, and figure out the complexity of human nature and the fine line between justice and slaughter. The psychological activities, words and behavior of a character are reflections of his qualities. Therefore, the author will choose several examples to illustrate how these descriptions work to the portrayal of a person and highlight the theme.

2. 研究的基本内容与方案

Detective stories are always connected with the issue of justice and evil. Justice has been a pursuit for many people for a long time. However, the complexity of human nature makes it quiet hard to be a pure good man or bad guy. Agatha Christie has a strong sense of how complicated human beings are and supports a justice theory which should be more of a ubiquitous concern among the public than be dominated by certain functions such as jurisprudence. In her novel And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie express a partial objection to the conventional understandings of justice. All the characters are portrayed to exclusively represent general evil and forced to develop their capabilities of detecting and combating injustice. The most complex character among those is Mr Justice Wargrave, who has conducted the series of events and is considered as an integration of the blood lust and a sense of justice. One of the key problems the author tries to solve is to figure out how such two totally different qualities are incarnated in one man. The aim of this paper is to get a picture of how complicated human nature is and distinguish the line between justice and slaughter.

3. 研究计划与安排

before 26th, december settlement of the title

before 25th, february submission of the outline

before 25th, april submission of the first draft

4. 参考文献（12篇以上）

[1]cox, daniel. and then there were nones: an examination of the rising rate of religious non--affiliation among millennials. georgetown university, 2015.

[2]ghosh, arundhat. from holmes to sherlock: confession, surveillance, and the detective. bowling green state university. 2013.

[3]jia zhiyu. on the social significance of agatha christie`s detective fiction——based on the character studies. university of electronic science and technology，2009.