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Between them, the novel and the play have inspired no less than three film adaptations.Ī note about the title - Christie originally called the novel Ten Little Niggers, a reference to an old nursery rhyme that she places, framed, in the guest rooms of the ten characters in the story. It brought Christie her first success as a playwright, which would become another arena in which she triumphed. The popularity of And Then There Were None was enhanced greatly by Christie's own theatrical adaptation, which first appeared on London's West End in 1943 and on Broadway a few months later. "I wrote the book after a tremendous amount of planning," the author later wrote, "and I was pleased with what I had made of it." The critics agreed, both in England in 1939 and in America after the book's publication a year later. Christie herself said she wrote the novel because she was intrigued by the task of killing off the ten central characters in a plausible way that still allowed for compelling suspense. The plot of And Then There Were None is crafted with consummate skill, and the story told in a lean, vital style that drives the reader forward. Death shadows the house party, taking them one by one, leaving the living fugitive, to wonder who among them is the killer. These ten people would seem to have nothing in common, except that they all harbor dark secrets they will try to conceal - even as, it emerges, those secrets threaten their lives. When the guests arrive on Indian Island, their host seems to have vanished, leaving his home to them. Ten varied people, none of whom knows the other, are invited to a private island off the coast of Devon, to be the weekend guests of a mysterious host whom none of them knows. in 1940.Ī simple sketch of the plot will remind readers of this enduring tale without robbing the mystery of its delectable, impeccably wrought suspense. American readers might know the novel better as Ten Little Indians, the original title under which it was published in the U.S. Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None is probably the signature novel of one of the best-selling authors of all time, a masterpiece of mystery and suspense that has been a fixture in popular literature since it was published in England in 1939.