Agatha Christie called And Then There Were None her hardest book to write
Ten strangers, an island off Devon, a nursery rhyme framed in every bedroom and ten little figurines that vanish one by one. With more than 100 million copies sold by 2007, Agatha Christie's 1939 puzzle is the best-selling mystery novel ever, and she judged it the finest piece of craftsmanship she produced.
The setup is ruthless in its simplicity. Eight guests arrive on a small island, greeted by a butler and cook, Thomas and Ethel Rogers, who say their hosts, a Mr and Mrs U.N. Owen, are delayed. After dinner a gramophone record accuses each person of having caused a death and escaped justice. Nobody has actually met the Owens, and the first guest collapses from poison moments later. As people die, each death mirrors a line of the rhyme and another figurine disappears from the dining table.
The cast is a gallery of respectable guilt: a retired judge, a Harley Street doctor, a former police inspector, a pious elderly spinster, a governess turned games mistress, an old First World War general and a reckless rich young man. Searches reveal no one else on the island, so suspicion turns inward, and the survivors watch each other with growing dread. When Scotland Yard finally lands, officers find ten bodies and no obvious killer; the answer arrives separately, in a confession sealed in a bottle and pulled from the sea.
Christie said the intricate plot and its resolution made this the most difficult of her novels. Reviewers praised its ingenuity from the start. The Crime Writers' Association placed it nineteenth among the best crime novels in 1990, the Mystery Writers of America ranked it tenth in 1995, and in 2015 a worldwide vote run by her estate named it readers' favourite Christie. It has been adapted for stage, screen and radio more than any other of her books.
Its title has a troubling history. Collins Crime Club first issued it in Britain in 1939 under a racial slur taken from an 1869 minstrel song by Frank Green, itself modelled on an American comic song, and that title survived in Britain until 1985. The first American edition in 1940 used And Then There Were None, and later printings changed the rhyme to soldier boys. Today it appears in English only under that name.
Source: And Then There Were None
