And then there were none

September 12, 2011 5:07 AM

Ten Little Niggers is the world's best-selling mystery ever, and one of the best-selling books of all time. This 1939 Agatha Christie novel, swiftly re-titled And Then There Were None, has been made into a movie several times. Due to a copyright lapse by 20th Century Fox, the 1945 movie is completely online. It's a very tricky mystery, if you like that sort of thing.
posted by twoleftfeet (32 comments total)

I had totally forgotten about the name change. Great this is online.

Re: The title- I was reading a Georgette Heyer mystery this weekend (from 1933 I think), a very gentle, fun mystery. About halfway through someone describes a scene of action as "he was working like a n*****" and I about dropped the book.
posted by pointystick at 5:12 AM on September 12, 2011

There's an interesting backstory to the original name here; it came from an 1860s nursery rhyme originally called "Ten Little Indians."
posted by mediareport at 5:15 AM on September 12, 2011

Wow, I had no idea that was the original name of that novel, the copy I read years ago was titled Ten Little Indians.
posted by octothorpe at 5:16 AM on September 12, 2011

Interesting. Now I understand the lyric in the Rolling Stones song "Sweet Black Angel."

Ten little niggers
Sittin' on de wall,
Her brothers been a fallin',
Fallin' one by one.
For a judge they murdered
And a judge they stole,
Now de judge he gonna judge her
For all dat he's worth.
posted by punkfloyd at 5:16 AM on September 12, 2011

I'm sorry, the answer was naggers. Oh... naggers.
posted by fungible at 5:17 AM on September 12, 2011 [11 favorites]

I knew about the original name, but I thought the nursery rhyme was changed TO not FROM "Ten Little Indians".
posted by DU at 5:17 AM on September 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

The original piece, then called "10 Little Injuns", was written by songwriter Septimus Winner in 1868 for a minstrel show...This song was adapted, possibly by Frank J. Green in 1869, as "Ten Little Niggers" and became a standard of the blackface minstrel shows. It was sung by Christy's Minstrels and became widely known in Europe, where it was used by Agatha Christie in her novel of the same name.
posted by mediareport at 5:24 AM on September 12, 2011 [2 favorites]

Octothorpe - I had forgotten that too. Because I remember when I was a kid seeing the book, grabbing it from a shelf (I was a handful on the weekly library visits), looking at it, and being surprised it wasn't a Western.
posted by pointystick at 5:27 AM on September 12, 2011

Re: The title- I was reading a Georgette Heyer mystery this weekend (from 1933 I think), a very gentle, fun mystery. About halfway through someone describes a scene of action as "he was working like a n*****" and I about dropped the book.

Some years ago I visited the L.M. Montgomery archive at the University of Guelph, and was allowed to peruse her journals and the set of photos she'd had taken herself in her trousseau. When I opened one of the journals the very first entry I saw began, "I worked like a nigger today!"

This entry was not reproduced in any of the five volumes of Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery.
posted by orange swan at 5:37 AM on September 12, 2011 [7 favorites]

There's something interesting that publishers would go 'oh shit, the word niggers is in the title!' and then swiftly change it to Indians.
posted by shakespeherian at 5:40 AM on September 12, 2011 [5 favorites]

As a black guy, my first and last response is to say fuck Agatha Christie.
posted by jake1 at 5:42 AM on September 12, 2011 [4 favorites]

When I read it as a kid, the new title on my edition was And Then There Were None. Didn't find out about the change until much much later. There's still a lot of problematic stuff in there, I'm sure, which I wouldn't have picked up back then.
posted by kmz at 5:54 AM on September 12, 2011

The movie version with Frank Stallone, though, is the gold standard.
posted by inturnaround at 5:54 AM on September 12, 2011

There really aren't any racist elements in the story (at least not anything as extreme as the title makes it sound). It's a reference to a nursery rhyme, which is a pretty common Christie device. And it's a really, really good story. One of the 3 best Christie mysteries (the other two being Murder on the Orient Express and the Murder of Roger Ackroyd).
posted by DU at 5:55 AM on September 12, 2011 [2 favorites]

As a black guy, my first and last response is to say fuck Agatha Christie.

It would have been commonplace. It's not right, but you can't judge someone from the 30's in the same way as a modern person.
posted by Not Supplied at 5:57 AM on September 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

The movie version with Frank Stallone, though, is the gold standard.

I wasn't going to mention this, because I'm trying to be all "public domain" and shit, but c'mon... Frank Stallone! Here's Part 1 (etc.)

I just know I'm taking big bucks away from Frank Stallone by even linking to this, but I can't help myself.
posted by twoleftfeet at 6:00 AM on September 12, 2011

It would have been commonplace. It's not right, but you can't judge someone from the 30's in the same way as a modern person.

Watch me.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:02 AM on September 12, 2011 [15 favorites]

but you can't judge someone from the 30's

Yes, I can. Plenty of people in the 1930s knew right from wrong.
posted by Devils Rancher at 6:05 AM on September 12, 2011 [2 favorites]

I read "The Grand Sophy" by Georgette Heyer, and found the anti-semitism a bit disconcerting, I would have expected this kind of thing to be extinct by the Fifties.

...the door was slowly opened to reveal a thin, swarthy individual, with long greasy curls, a semitic nose, and an ingratiating leer. He was dressed in a suit of rusty black, and nothing about him suggested sufficient affluence to lend as much as five hundred pence to anyone. His hooded eyes rapidly took in every detail of Sophy's appearance, from the curled feathers in her high-crowned hat to the neat kid boots upon her feet.

"Good-morning!" said Sophy. "Are you Mr Goldhanger?"

He stood, a little bent, before her, wiping his hands together...

...The instinct of his race made him prefer, whenever possible, to maintain a manner of the utmost urbanity, so he now smiled, and bowed, and said that my lady was welcome to do whatever she pleased in his humble abode.

posted by TheophileEscargot at 6:07 AM on September 12, 2011

It would have been commonplace. It's not right, but you can't judge someone from the 30's in the same way as a modern person.

Watch me.

phht
posted by Not Supplied at 6:07 AM on September 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

And the thread was hijacked by the first sentence, which really has nothing to do with the rest of the post. Can we move past the problematic title and discuss either the novel itself or the interesting movie copyright situation?

The title was thankfully changed because the book is really excellent and from what I recall doesn't really bear much racist content. The book made me pick up several other mysteries (including Murder on the Orient Express, which is also excellent) and serves as a wonderful gateway to the genre.
posted by This Guy at 6:10 AM on September 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

I believe that both of the following are true:
Agatha Christie is an entertaining author.
That was a really stupid title.
posted by LogicalDash at 6:12 AM on September 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

Hitchcock did her, didn't he? Seems like shed be up his alley. Or he'd be up hers, I guess, as they were productive around the same time.
posted by From Bklyn at 6:14 AM on September 12, 2011

At the risk of it seeming like I'm dredging an old argument, (which really isn't my intent: I think it's relevant to a thread in which how the name is perceived and treated nowadays, and the difficulties of using it in a modern context, is being discussed,) but here on MeFi, even linking to external pages which refer to the book by this title has gotten a comment deleted before. (Not by me, by.. Clavdivs was it? I forget, but I think so.)

on preview, sorry This Guy. :-)
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 6:16 AM on September 12, 2011

An ignorant title, later fixed. We all make mistakes that does not mean they either must or will be forgiven...
She ever talk about changing the title? Anyone?
posted by From Bklyn at 6:16 AM on September 12, 2011

The bolding was gratuitous.
posted by cashman at 6:16 AM on September 12, 2011

Can we move past the problematic title and discuss either the novel itself or the interesting movie copyright situation?

Ok, let's discuss the book covers that actually used the original title.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:17 AM on September 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

There was a discussion of anti-semitism in The Grand Sophy recently in SBTB.

I think there was also a conversation in MeTa not very long ago about the title of "And Then There Were None".

Can't say I care much for the book - Christie's, I mean, not Heyer's - too sinister for me, not comfort reading in the same way as her Poirot and Marple ones.
posted by paduasoy at 6:17 AM on September 12, 2011 [2 favorites]

the thread was hijacked by the first sentence

Absolutely right. Sorry about that. Ten Little Indians (or whatever you want to call it) actually has nothing whatsoever to do with race. It really is a great mystery novel. The plot is very clever. The 1945 movie is a great way to experience one of the most intricate plots from the Golden Age of detective fiction. That's really all I wanted to say.

I got fixated on the stupid original title myself. Sorry again.

Really though, who did it?
posted by twoleftfeet at 6:17 AM on September 12, 2011

It's been a while, but I think I remember the book annoying me, in that "Well, there's no way anyone could solve this if you're lying to the reader" sense.. though like I said, it has been a while.
posted by John Kenneth Fisher at 6:18 AM on September 12, 2011

but you can't judge someone from the 30's in the same way as a modern person.
posted by Not Supplied at 8:57 AM on September 12

As a point of reference, PAT BUCHANAN was born in 1938.

There is such a thing as structural racism ---the elements of race-based bigotry that literally molds and informs a culture in ways you just can't overcome by just suppressing but only by active conscious raising.

The works of Agatha Christie are steeped in the privileges afforded to Brits thru colonial power. Their rendition into film and TV shows are about cultivating a very well manicured --may i dare say, kindler and gentler vision-- of the spoils enjoyed by a social class or two that could only exist thru the ruthless colonial exploitation and imperial subjugation of whole nations of niggers.

It's rather naive and telling anyone in the United States --a country where the descendants of Europeans enjoy the racialist privileges stripped from the backs of injuns, niggers and wetbacks-- would consider a little old lady of the 1930s immune to modern day deconstruction of structural racist poetics.
posted by liza at 6:22 AM on September 12, 2011 [3 favorites]

The British comedy show The Goodies had an really extended riff on this. It went on and on and on. They'd count down the deaths as people were murdered and say "Nine little a hem-hem-hems sitting there in state, someone lit the touchpaper, now, there's only eight." This was produced in 1976.

The joke, you see, was that they weren't saying "nigger". Unlike another episode where they did say it,(*) again for the laugh value. And I remember a couple of Minstrel routines too.

(*) Tim Brooke-Taylor is talking to a horse: "You're black ... and beautiful ... black ... beautiful ... I shall call you nigger!"
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:23 AM on September 12, 2011 [1 favorite]