And Then There Were None

Agatha Christie wrote in her autobiography that she took the book on because it was so difficult that the idea fascinated her. Ten people had to die without the story becoming ridiculous or the murderer becoming obvious. She said she was pleased with what she made of it, and that nobody but she knew how hard it had been.[1]

Her notebooks show the planning. She first considered at least twelve guests rather than ten. The crimes on the gramophone record went through several versions: in one draft Vera Claythorne had driven a lover to suicide, Emily Brent had poisoned a servant, and the general had sent thirty men needlessly to their deaths.[2]

The title has its own history, and it belongs in any honest account of the book. The Collins Crime Club published the novel in London on 6 November 1939 under a title taken from a Victorian minstrel song, one that used a racial slur. Dodd, Mead would not print that title in the United States and published the book in January 1940 as And Then There Were None, the last line of the rhyme. American paperbacks from 1964 used a third title, Ten Little Indians. British editions kept the original until 1985. The French edition was retitled only in 2020, at the request of Christie's great-grandson James Prichard, who runs her estate.[3][4]

Current editions call the island Soldier Island and the rhyme Ten Little Soldier Boys. The estate's own page for the book uses those names, and so do the notes below.[5]

Eight guests travel to Devon on the same August day, each with a different reason. Vera Claythorne has been hired as a secretary. Philip Lombard has been paid a hundred guineas to be useful. Emily Brent has a letter from an old acquaintance. Justice Wargrave, a retired judge, has an invitation from a friend. Dr Armstrong has been asked to attend a nervous wife. General Macarthur expects old comrades. Anthony Marston expects a party. William Blore, a former policeman, is there under a false name to watch the others. At the house a married couple, Thomas and Ethel Rogers, have been engaged by post as butler and cook. The host is absent.

In every bedroom hangs a framed copy of a nursery rhyme, Ten Little Soldier Boys, in which the boys die one by one until there are none. On the dining table stand ten china figures of soldiers. After dinner a voice from a gramophone record names each guest and each servant, and charges each with a death. A drunken operation. A child allowed to drown. A servant girl dismissed and driven to suicide. Twenty-one African tribesmen abandoned, an employer left to die, a man sent to the gallows.

Anthony Marston laughs it off, drinks, and chokes to death on cyanide. In the morning Ethel Rogers does not wake. The boat that should bring supplies does not come, and the guests find that no one on the island is who they were told. There is no Mr Owen. One by one the china soldiers disappear from the table.

General Macarthur is found on the shore, struck on the back of the head. A search of the island finds nobody but themselves. Rogers is killed with an axe while chopping firewood. Emily Brent dies at the breakfast table from an injection, a bee crawling on the window. The survivors search each other's rooms, lock away the doctor's drugs and Lombard's revolver, and find the revolver gone.

Justice Wargrave is found in the drawing room in a scarlet curtain and a grey wool wig, shot through the forehead. Dr Armstrong pronounces him dead. That night Armstrong vanishes from the house. In the morning Blore, Lombard and Vera are three, and they no longer trust one another enough to be indoors. Blore goes back for food and is crushed by a marble clock shaped like a bear, dropped from a window above. On the beach Vera and Lombard find Armstrong's drowned body in the rocks.