And Then There Were None

And Then There Were Noneis amystery novelby the English writerAgatha Christie, who described it as the most difficult of her books to write.It was first published in the United Kingdom by theCollins Crime Clubon 6 November 1939, asTen Little Niggers,after an 1869minstrel songthat serves as a major plot element.The US edition was released in January 1940 with the titleAnd Then There Were None, taken from the last five words of the song.Successive American reprints and adaptations use that title, though AmericanPocket Bookspaperbacks used the titleTen Little Indiansbetween 1964 and 1986. UK editions continued to use the original title until 1985.
The book is the world's best-selling mystery, and with over 100 million copies sold is one of thebest-selling booksof all time. The novel has been listed as the seventh best-selling title (any language, including reference works) of all time.
Eight people arrive on a small, isolated island off theDevoncoast, each having received an unexpected invitation. They are met by the butler and housekeeper, Thomas and Ethel Rogers, who explain that their hosts, Mr and Mrs Owen, have not yet arrived. A framed copy of an old rhyme hangs in every guest's room, and on the dining room table sit ten figurines. Acting on the host's written instructions, Mr Rogers puts on agramophonerecord, which accuses all ten people present of having committed murder. The guests realise that none of them know the Owens. Anthony Marston finishes his drink and promptly dies fromcyanide poisoning.
The next morning, Mrs Rogers is found dead in her bed. Suspecting that their unknown host may have caused the deaths, some of the guests search the island, but find nobody else. After General MacArthur dies from a blow to the head, the guests conclude that one of the seven remaining persons must be responsible. The following day, Mr Rogers is found dead at the woodpile, having been attacked with an axe, and Emily Brent is found dead in the drawing room, having been injected withpotassium cyanide. The guests realise that one figurine in the dining room is being removed after each death, and that the manner of the deaths corresponds with the wording of the rhyme.
Mr Justice Wargrave suggests that all drugs and firearms should be secured, and that everyone should submit to a search. Philip Lombard's gun cannot be found. That evening, Vera Claythorne goes up to her room and screams when she finds seaweed hanging from the ceiling. Most of the remaining guests rush upstairs; when they return they find Wargrave still downstairs in his chair. Dr Armstrong pronounces him dead from a gunshot wound to the forehead. That night, Lombard's gun is returned, William Blore sees someone leaving the house, and Armstrong mysteriously disappears.
After breakfast next morning, Vera, Lombard, and Blore go out. When Blore returns for food, he is killed by a bear-shaped marble clock that falls from Vera's window sill. Vera and Lombard find Armstrong's drowned body washed up on the beach, and each concludes the other must be responsible. Vera suggests moving Armstrong's body, and then grabs Lombard's gun and shoots him dead. Believing she is now safe, Vera returns to the house, only to find a noose and chair set up in her room. Recalling the last line of the rhyme, she hangs herself.
Scotland Yardofficials arrive to find ten bodies. They discover that a sleazy agent named Isaac Morris had purchased the island and made all the arrangements on behalf of an unknown buyer. While the guests were on the island, Morris had died from an overdose ofbarbiturates, leaving nothing to indicate the buyer's identity. From the victims' diaries, the police reconstruct the first six deaths. They deduce that neither Armstrong, Lombard, nor Vera could have been the last person alive, as objects had been moved after their deaths, and they consider Blore's death unlikely to have been suicide. All indications are that no one else was on the island during this time, leaving the police mystified.
Asealed bottleis recovered from the sea, containing a written confession by Wargrave. He reveals that all his life he had possessed both a strong sense of justice and a savage bloodlust, contradictory impulses he had satisfied by becoming a judge and sentencing criminals to death. After a terminal medical diagnosis, he decided to mete out his version of justice to individuals he considered had escaped legal punishment. He hired Morris to make the arrangements, then tricked him into overdosing. Posing as one of the invited guests, he included a charge against himself in the gramophone recording. Once it became clear that the killer was one of the group, Wargrave tricked Dr Armstrong into helping him fake his own death as part of a fictitious scheme to trap the murderer into incriminating himself. After all the others were dead, Wargrave shot himself, making sure that his true death matched his staged death recorded in the guests' diaries, so that investigators would be left with "ten dead bodies and an unsolved problem".
The plot is structured around the ten lines of the rhyme "Ten Little Niggers",a popular 1869minstrel songwritten for the Christie Minstrels by the British songwriter Frank Green.Green had modelled his lyrics on an American comic song "Ten Little Indians" [or Injuns]bySeptimus Winnerthat had been published the year before.In later editions of the novel, the characters of the rhyme are replaced by "Ten Little Indians" or "Ten Little Soldiers".
This is the rhyme as published in a British 2008 edition:
Each of the ten victims – eight guests plus the island's two caretakers – is killed in a manner that reflects one of the lines of the rhyme. A sleazy agent who helped arrange the affair is also killed, but his killing occurs on the mainland and outside of the main storyline.
Writing forThe Times Literary Supplementof 11 November 1939, Maurice Percy Ashley stated, "If her latest story has scarcely any detection in it there is no scarcity of murders ... There is a certain feeling of monotony inescapable in the regularity of the deaths which is better suited to a serialized newspaper story than a full-length novel. Yet there is an ingenious problem to solve in naming the murderer", he continued. "It will be an extremely astute reader who guesses correctly."
ForThe New York Times Book Review(25 February 1940), Isaac Anderson has arrived to the point where "the voice" accuses the ten "guests" of their past crimes, which have all resulted in the deaths of humans, and then said, "When you read what happens after that you will not believe it, but you will keep on reading, and as one incredible event is followed by another even more incredible you will still keep on reading. The whole thing is utterly impossible and utterly fascinating. It is the most baffling mystery that Agatha Christie has ever written, and if any other writer has ever surpassed it for sheer puzzlement the name escapes our memory. We are referring, of course, to mysteries that have logical explanations, as this one has. It is a tall story, to be sure, but it could have happened."
Many compared the book to her 1926 novelThe Murder of Roger Ackroyd. For instance, an unnamed reviewer in theToronto Daily Starof 16 March 1940 said, "Others have written better mysteries than Agatha Christie, but no one can touch her for ingenious plot and surprise ending. WithAnd Then There Were None... she is at her most ingenious and most surprising ... is, indeed, considerably above the standard of her last few works and close to theRoger Ackroydlevel."
Other critics laud the use of plot twists andsurprise endings. Maurice Richardson wrote a rhapsodic review inThe Observer'sissue of 5 November 1939 which began, "No wonder Agatha Christie's latest has sent her publishers into avatictrance. We will refrain, however, from any invidious comparisons withRoger Ackroydand be content with saying thatTen Little Niggersis one of the very best, most genuinely bewildering Christies yet written. We will also have to refrain from reviewing it thoroughly, as it is so full of shocks that even the mildest revelation would spoil some surprise from somebody, and I am sure that you would rather have your entertainment kept fresh than criticism pure." After stating the set-up of the plot, Richardson concluded, "Story telling and characterisation are right at the top of Mrs Christie's baleful form. Her plot may be highly artificial, but it is neat, brilliantly cunning, soundly constructed, and free from any of those red-herring false trails which sometimes disfigure her work."
Robert Barnard, writing in 1990, concurred with the early reviews, describing the book as "Suspenseful and menacing detective-story-cum-thriller. The closed setting with the succession of deaths is here taken to its logical conclusion, and the dangers of ludicrousness and sheer reader-disbelief are skillfully avoided. Probably the best-known Christie, and justifiably among the most popular."
The original title of the mystery (Ten Little Niggers) was changed because it was offensive.  Alison Light, a literary critic and feminist scholar, opined that Christie's original title and the setting on "Nigger Island" (later changed to "Indian Island" and "Soldier Island", variously) were integral to the work. These aspects of the novel, she argued, "could be relied upon automatically to conjure up a thrilling 'otherness', a place where revelations about the 'dark side' of the English would be appropriate."Unlike novels such asHeart of Darkness, "Christie's location is both more domesticated and privatized, taking for granted the construction of racial fears woven into psychic life as early as the nursery. If her story suggests how easy it is to play upon such fears, it is also a reminder of how intimately tied they are to sources of pleasure and enjoyment."
In 1990Crime Writers' AssociationrankedAnd Then There Were None19th in theirThe Top 100 Crime Novels of All Timelist. In 1995 in a similar listMystery Writers of Americaranked the novel 10th.In September 2015, to mark her 125th birthday,And Then There Were Nonewas named the "World's Favourite Christie" in a vote sponsored by the author's estate.
In the "Binge!" article ofEntertainment WeeklyIssue #1343–44 (26 December 2014 – 3 January 2015), the writers pickedAnd Then There Were Noneas an "EW favorite" on the list of the "Nine Great Christie Novels".
"I had written the bookTen Little Niggersbecause it was so difficult to do that the idea had fascinated me. Ten people had to die without it becoming ridiculous or the murderer being obvious. I wrote the book after a tremendous amount of planning, and I was pleased with what I had made of it. It was clear, straightforward, baffling, and yet had a perfectly reasonable explanation; in fact, it had to have an epilogue in order to explain it. It was well received and reviewed, but the person who was really pleased with it was myself, for I knew better than any critic how difficult it had been ... I don't say it is the play or book of mine that I like best, or even that I think it is my best, but I do think in some ways that it is a better piece of craftsmanship than anything else I have written."
The novel has a long and noteworthy history of publication. It is a continuously best selling novel in English and in translation to other languages since its initial publication. From the start, in English, it was published under two different titles, due to different sensitivity to the author's title in the UK and in the US at first publication.
The novel was originally published in late 1939 and early 1940 almost simultaneously, in the United Kingdom and the United States.  The serialization was in 23 parts in theDaily Expressfrom Tuesday 6 June to Saturday 1 July 1939. All of the instalments carried an illustration by "Prescott" with the first having an illustration ofBurgh Islandin Devon which inspired the setting of the story. The serialized version did not contain any chapter divisions.The book retailed for seven shillings and sixpence.
In the UK the book first appeared under the titleTen Little Niggers, in book and newspaper serialized formats. In the United States it was published under the titleAnd Then There Were None, in both book and serial formats. Both of the original US publications changed the title from that originally used in the UK, due to the offensiveness of the wordin American culture, where it was more widely perceived as aracially loadedethnic slur or insult compared to the contemporaneous culture in the United Kingdom. The serialized version appeared in theSaturday Evening Postin seven parts from 20 May (Volume 211, Number 47) to 1 July 1939 (Volume 212, Number 1) with illustrations by Henry Raleigh, and the book was published in January 1940 byDodd, Mead and Companyfor $2.
In the original UK novel, and in succeeding publications until 1985, all references to "Indians" or "Soldiers" were originally "Nigger", including the island's name, the pivotal rhyme found by the visitors, and the ten figurines.UK editions continued to use the original title until the current definitive title appeared with a reprint of the 1963 Fontana Paperback in 1985.
The word "nigger" was already racially offensive in the United States by the start of the 20th century, and therefore the book's first US edition (1940) and first serialization changed the title toAnd Then There Were Noneand removed all references to the word from the book, as did the 1945 motion picture (except that the first US edition retained the phrase "nigger in the woodpile" in Chapter 2 Part VII and Chapter 7 Part III). Sensitivity to the original title of the novel was remarked by Sadie Stein in 2016, commenting on a BBC mini series with the titleAnd Then There Were None, where she noted that "even in 1939, this title was considered too offensive for American publication."In general, "Christie's work is not known for its racial sensitivity, and by modern standards her oeuvre is rife with casualOrientalism."The original title was based on a rhyme from minstrel shows and children's games. Stein quotes Alison Light as to the power of the original name of the island in the novel, Nigger Island, "to conjure up a thrilling 'otherness', a place where revelations about the 'dark side' of the English would be appropriate".Light goes on to say that "Christie's location [the island] is both more domesticated and privatised, taking for granted the construction of racial fears woven into psychic life as early as the nursery."Speaking of the "widely known"1945 film, Stein added that "we're merely faced with fantastic amounts of violence, and a rhyme so macabre and distressing one doesn't hear it now outside of the Agatha Christie context."She felt that the original title of the novel in the UK, seen now, "jars, viscerally".
And Then There Were Noneis the best-selling crime novel of all time, and made Agatha Christie the best-selling novelist, according to the Agatha Christie Estate.
It is Christie's best-selling novel, with more than 100 million copies sold; it is also the world's best-selling mystery and one of thebest-selling booksof all time. Publications International lists the novel as the seventh best-selling title of all time.
The book and its adaptations have been released under various new names since the original publication, includingTen Little Indians(1946 play,Broadwayperformance and 1964paperbackbook),Ten Little Soldiers,and official title per the Agatha Christie Limited website,And Then There Were None.UK editions continued to use the work's original title until the 1980s; the first UK edition to use the alternative titleAnd Then There Were Noneappeared in 1985 with a reprint of the 1963 Fontana Paperback.
Many older translations were based on the original British text, although the word used to translateniggerwas often somewhat less offensive, more analogous to Englishnegroornegrito. Languages where the most recent edition retains racial epithets include Spanish, Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian, Romanian,and Russian,as well as the 1987Soviet filmadaptationDesyat Negrityat. Changes similar to those in the British edition in the 1980s were made to theGermannovel in 2003,after 2002 protests inHanoveragainst a stage version using the old title.Similar changes were made inDutchin 2004,Swedishin 2007,Brazilian Portuguesein 2009,Polishin 2017,Frenchand Hungarian in 2020,andTurkishin 2021.In 1999, theSlovak National Theatrechanged the title of a stage adaptation mid-run.Theestateof Agatha Christie now offers it under only one title in English,And Then There Were None,and translations increasingly use the equivalent of this as their title.European Portuguesetranslations have been titledConvite Para a Morte(1948: "An Invitation to Death") andAs Dez Figuras Negras(2011: "The Ten Black Figures" – referring to the figurines, in this case minimally anthropomorphic).TheFinnishtranslationEikä yksikään pelastunut("No one was saved") in 1940 had its title taken from the American first edition, before being renamedKymmenen pientä neekeripoikaa("Ten little negro boys") in 1968. This change was reversed in 2003.
The 1930 novelThe Invisible HostbyGwen BristowandBruce Manninghas a plot that strongly matches that of Christie's later novel, including a recorded voice announcing to the guests that their sins will be visited upon them by death.The Invisible Hostwas adapted as the 1930BroadwayplayThe Ninth GuestbyOwen Davis,which itself was adapted as the 1934 filmThe Ninth Guest. There is no evidence Christie saw either the play (which had a brief run on Broadway) or the film.
The 1933K.B.S. ProductionsSherlock HolmesfilmA Study in Scarletfollows a strikingly similar plot;the victims are tormented by slips of paper inspired by the same poem used in Christie's novel. One says "Six Little Black Boys | Playing With a Hive | A Bumble-Bee Stung One | And Then There Were Five." As in Christie's book, the killer turns out to be one of the "victims" who had appeared to be dead. The film retained no plot points fromArthur Conan Doyle's originalstory of the same name. The author of the movie's screenplay,Robert Florey, "doubted that [Christie] had seenA Study in Scarlet, but he regarded it as a compliment if it had helped inspire her".
And Then There Were Nonehas had more adaptations than any other work byAgatha Christie.Christie herself changed the bleak ending to a more palatable one for theatre audiences when she adapted the novel for the stage in 1943. Many adaptations incorporate changes to the story, such as using Christie's alternative ending from her stage play or changing the setting to locations other than an island.
There have been numerous film adaptations of the novel:
The BBC broadcastTen Little Niggers(1947), adapted byAyton Whitaker, first aired as a Monday Matinee on theBBC Home Serviceon 27 December 1947 and asSaturday Night Theatreon theBBC Light Programmeon 29 December.
On 13 November 2010, as part of itsSaturday Playseries,BBC Radio 4broadcast a 90-minute adaptation written byJoy Wilkinson. The production was directed by Mary Peate and featuredGeoffrey Whiteheadas Mr Justice Wargrave,Lyndsey Marshalas Vera Claythorne,Alex Wyndhamas Philip Lombard,John Roweas Dr Armstrong, andJoanna Monroas Emily Brent.
And Then There Were None(1943) is Christie's adaptation of the story for the stage. She and the producers agreed that audiences might not flock to a tale with such a grim ending as the novel, nor would it work well dramatically as there would be no one left to tell the story. Christie reworked the ending for Lombard and Vera to be innocent of the crimes of which they were accused, survive, and fall in love with each other. Some of the names were also changed, e.g., General MacArthur became General McKenzie in both the New York and London productions.By 1943, GeneralDouglas MacArthurwas playing a prominent role in thePacific TheatreofWorld War II, which may explain the change of the character's name.
Ten Little Niggers(1944):Dundee Repertory Theatre Companywas given special permission to restore the original ending of the novel. The company first performed a stage adaptation of the novel in August 1944 under the UK title of the novel, with Christie credited as the dramatist.It was the first performance in repertory theatre.It was staged again in 1965.There was an article in theDundee Evening Registerin August 1944 about it.
And Then There Were None(2005): On 14 October 2005, a new version of the play, written by Kevin Elyot and directed bySteven Pimlott, opened at theGielgud Theatrein London. For this version, Elyot returned to the original story in the novel, restoring the nihilism of the original.
Three British TV adaptations have been broadcast. The first two, which appeared under Christie's original title, were produced by the BBC in 1949and by ITV in 1959.The third aired onBBC Onein December 2015 asAnd Then There Were None.
An American TV movie byPaul Bogartaired on NBC in 1959. In 2010, American animated TV seriesFamily Guyadapted the story as "And Then There Were Fewer".
There have been many foreign-language TV adaptations:
The novel was the inspiration for several video games. For theApple II,Online SystemsreleasedMystery Housein 1980. On the PC,The Adventure CompanyreleasedAgatha Christie: And Then There Were Nonein 2005, the first in a series ofPC games based on Christie novels. In February 2008, it was ported to theWiiconsole.
And Then There Were Nonewas released byHarperCollinsas agraphic noveladaptation on 30 April 2009, adapted by François Rivière and illustrated by Frank Leclercq.
In 2014 Peká Editorial released aboard gamebased on the book,Diez Negritos("Ten Little Negroes"), created by Judit Hurtado and Fernando Chavarría, and illustrated by Esperanza Peinado.
The 2014 live action comedy-crime and murder mystery TV web seriesTen Little Roosters, produced by American companyRooster Teeth, is largely inspired byAnd Then There Were None.