And Then There Were None

Agatha Christie’s famous detective story without a detective, adapted by Joy Wilkinson, dramatised by BBC Radio 4.

Ten guests are separately invited to an island by a person none of them knows very well, if at-all. Each has been invited on a pretext. When they arrive, it seems they have all been invited for different reasons. Nothing quite adds up.

An anonymous voice accuses each of them of having murdered someone. By the end of the first night, one of the guests is dead. Stranded by a violent storm and tormented by the nursery rhyme ‘Ten Little Soldier Boys’, the ten guests fear for their lives. Who is the killer? Is it one of them?

• And Then There Were None

BBC as usual does not keep on-line, only available for seven days.

And Then There Were None was originally published as Ten Little Niggers (1939), the title referred to a nursery rhyme. The title was changed to And Then There Were None for US publication, and the nursery rhyme changed to Ten Little Indians.

Ten strangers are invited to an island from where there is no escape. Each is complicit in a murder, each dies in a manner suggested in the nursery rhyme. On the table ten soldier boys. Each time one of the guests dies, one of the soldier boys is found smashed.

And Then There Were None is unusual in that neither of her famous detectives makes an appearance. All the more surprising then, that it is her best selling novel. Sales are estimated to be in excess of 100 million, making it the highest selling crime novel.

Tags: Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None, crime fiction, Ten Little Niggers