And Then There Were None

And Then There Were None is a mystery novel by the English writer Agatha Christie, who described it as the most difficult of her books to write. It was first published in the United Kingdom by the Collins Crime Club in 1939, as Ten Little Niggers, after an 1869 minstrel song that serves as a major plot element. The US edition was released in 1940 with the title And Then There Were None, taken from the last five words of the song. Successive American reprints and adaptations use that title, though American Pocket Books paperbacks used the title Ten Little Indians between 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 as at 2007, is one of the best-selling books of all time. The novel has been listed as the seventh best-selling title (any language, including reference works) of all time.

Plot

Eight people arrive on a small, isolated island off the Devon coast, 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 written instructions, Mr Rogers puts on a gramophone record, 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 from cyanide poisoning.

The next morning, Mrs Rogers is found dead in her bed. Suspecting their unknown host, 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 with potassium 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 in his chair, wearing his judicial wig and scarlet robes. 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 Yard officials arrive to find ten bodies. They discover that a sleazy agent named Isaac Morris had purchased the island and made the arrangements on behalf of an unknown buyer. While the guests were on the island, Morris had died from an overdose of barbiturates, 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.

A sealed bottle is 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 decided to kill them in order of increasing guilt. 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".

Principal characters

• Edward George Armstrong – a Harley Street doctor
• William Henry Blore – a former police inspector, now a private investigator
• Emily Caroline Brent – an elderly, pious spinster
• Vera Elizabeth Claythorne – a sports mistress at a girls' school and former governess
• Philip Lombard – a soldier of fortune
• John Gordon MacArthur – a retired World War I general
• Anthony James Marston – a wealthy and irresponsible young man
• Ethel Rogers – the cook and housekeeper, and Thomas Rogers's wife
• Thomas Rogers – the butler and Ethel Rogers's husband
• Lawrence John Wargrave (Mr Justice Wargrave) – a retired criminal judge

Motivating rhyme

The plot is structured around the ten lines of the rhyme "Ten Little Niggers", a popular 1869 minstrel song written for the Christy's Minstrels by the British songwriter Frank Green. Green had modelled his lyrics on an American comic song "Ten Little Indians" [or Injuns] by Septimus Winner that 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 Soldier Boys".

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.

Correspondence between rhyme and modes of death

Literary significance and reception

Writing for The Times Literary Supplement of 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."

In The New York Times Book Review of 25 February 1940, Isaac Anderson said, "When you read what happens after [the playing of the gramophone record] 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 novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. For instance, an unnamed reviewer in the Toronto Daily Star of 16 March 1940 said, "Others have written better mysteries than Agatha Christie, but no one can touch her for ingenious plot and surprise ending. With And 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 the Roger Ackroyd level."

Other critics laud the use of plot twists and surprise endings. Maurice Richardson wrote a rhapsodic review in The Observer's issue of 5 November 1939 which began, "No wonder Agatha Christie's latest has sent her publishers into a vatic trance. We will refrain, however, from any invidious comparisons with Roger Ackroyd and be content with saying that Ten Little Niggers is 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."