REVIEW: Ten Little Indians

Ten Little Indians
Author: Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie has been my favorite author since I was 9 and bought a box collection of old Hercule Poirot novels at a garage sale in my neighborhood. I still have those books, and many others by Christie in my personal library.

Ten Little Indians (or And Then There Were None) is a fabulous locked room mystery. A group of 10 people receive invitations to visit Indian Island off the Devon Coast. They arrive by boat, only to find out that none of them actually know the host, a Mr. U.N. Owen. While enjoying drinks and conversation, a recorded voice accuses each of them, one by one, of murder. The recording gives the name and date of each killing, leaving the group stunned and groping for excuses. Little do they know that they are all going to be picked off one at a time by an unseen killer.  As the group gets smaller and smaller, the survivors scramble to figure out where their host might be hiding, or if it's one of their group doing the killing.

Agatha Christie wrote this book in 1939, wrapping the plot around an old poem. The poem figures prominently into the plot, giving away the mode of death for each guest in order. Originally the poem used a racist term -- the N word. In fact the original title of the book was Ten Little N-----s.  In subsequent versions of the book, the wording has been changed to indians, soldiers and other terms, and the title of the book was changed to Ten Little Indians and also And Then There Were None. I prefer And Then There Were None....but my old copy of the book from the 80s is titled Ten Little Indians. The recent miniseries with Sam Neil changed it to Soldier Island and the 10 statues on the table with one disappearing after each death were little soldiers. My modern sensibilities can't wrap around the fact that the title of this book originally had the N word in it.....I am glad that the world has changed enough that the word was removed, allowing the mystery to remain classic without being offensive.

Offensive language aside, this mystery is acknowledged as one of the best ever written, and it has been imitated many times in the nearly 80 years since its publication. The language and situations are a bit dated now, but the story is still enjoyable and surprising. I can't imagine the panic and desperation that the characters felt, trapped on an island while a killer murders them one by one. Re-reading this book for the first time in years, I had to say that I was a bit incredulous that a group of people would accept an invitation without doing any checking on the person it came from.....but then again, modern people often trust strangers they meet on social media and dating sites. It's the same sort of situation. I guess we all feel that murder and dangerous situations happen to other people.....and I'm sure that's how this group of 10 characters felt. They were flattered to be invited to the estate on this island and didn't think there would be any danger. Boy, were they ever wrong.

I enjoyed re-reading this book, and now that I'm finished I'm going to watch the miniseries again. It stays closer to the book than the classic Black & White movie does (20th Century Fox, released 1945).