This was clearly one of Christie's top yields but the work has come under fire of late for being "racist" -- the original unfortunate English title was "Ten Little Niggers" (1939) -- I don't know what in the world Christie's publishers were thinking about!
Some would say that "Ten Little Indians" (1940) is a racist title as well but the first one was clearly more derogatory (by degrees, I suppose) than the current one. Yet a third title/renaming has come about too in the United States (mostly due to movies being made from this book): "And Then There Were None". Obviously it would have been nice if that had been the FIRST and ONLY title!
But, while folks are focused solely upon the title as being racist, I feel compelled to also point out to sensitive readers that there is additional racist language to be found within. Christie (sort of unnecessarily) has one of the principals commenting, "There's a nigger in the woodpile," a sentence that she actually uses in yet another of her mysteries as well.
Now, I'm not going to be unfairly anachronistic in my evaluation of Christie as a renowned author by asserting that she was an active racist -- clearly, she was grossly insensitive to people of colour in many of her writings but so was Hemingway, Dorothy L. Sayers, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and a host of other period writers. This unbridled use of the word "nigger" was as common as the dickens in literature of the 20s, 30s, 40s, and even the 50s -- that hardly makes it right or acceptable but this was an actuality of our literary legacy and we cannot go back and undo it. We can only learn from it and hopefully reform.
Now, I said all that because, especially, people of color today (or whites for that matter) have every right to be highly offended by Christie's insensitivity and, thus, not patronize her contemporary estate wealth by boycotting this book. But first, such persons had to have been made AWARE of these facts in order to be well-informed on the matter, that being the sole purpose of my introduction here.
To summarize my own views, I'm not a person who believes that we should remove this hurtful language from such older works -- if we are to learn from our history, we need to be reminded of it. People forget such things too easily. Sunshine sanitizes. But, being white myself, I cannot pretend to know how a black person might feel when he or she hears or reads such hurtful language used in a purposefully denigrating and/or mendacious manner.... and, there are clearly numerous views on this other than my own and they may in fact be better-founded and more correct.
In regard to the story/mystery, ten people get enticed to a small, remote island for a period of free, high-class recreation. The reality is that these folks have all committed murder in one sense or another but their crimes either went undiscovered or, they were not looked upon as actual murders, ergo, the dashing young playboy who "accidentally" ran down two children and got his driver's license revoked, but no more punishment than that.
The murderer in this case plans to effect some vigilante justice, covertly killing off his victims one at a time, generating ever more terror in the remaining island guests as he does so. His killings follow the descriptions found in the poem "Ten Little Indians" which is posted in each of the guests' (victims') rooms.
The island guests represent a cross section of humanity, a judge, an ex-policeman, a governess, an old spinster, a playboy, etc. And the murderer clearly does face one big problem: How does he or she escape from the island once the pick-up boat arrives to take everyone back to the mainland? Well, this is achieved very shrewdly, and I'll stop there.
This mystery has it all including a brilliant setting, a good story, a nice big storm that traps everyone on the island until the murders are concluded, stoic British servants (also victims!) and, an ending that few have ever guessed, albeit the clues are there for the reader to solve the crime.
When the police show up after the fact, they are totally befuddled by the crime but the murderer cannot live with art for art's sake -- the murderer has devised a way to detail how the crime was commited AFTER being beyond the grasp of the law. This is one of the few Christie tales which does not feature a major detective figure, either professional or amateur. Yes, this is one of Christie's best five books out of the 80 or so that she wrote.
As a last note, the very best film version of this story is the Russian one (I've seen them all many times):
Ten Little Indians / Desyat' Negrityat
Unfortunately, the Russians are still using the original racist title! Their version is incredibly well-done, true to the original story, and of high quality, subtitled in English.
And there you have it, folks.
