And Then There Were None

Agatha Christie, an English writer, published the mystery novel And Then There Were None in 1939. It is a closed-circle mystery: ten strangers are brought to an island off the coast of Devon, each of them accused of a death in their past that was never answered for.

Once they are on the island their host is nowhere to be found, and a recording accuses each of them in turn of a crime the law could not touch. Then they begin to die, one at a time, in the order set out by a counting rhyme that hangs framed in every bedroom.

There is no way off the island, so whoever is killing them must be one of the remaining guests, and the novel follows the group as they try to work out both who is doing it and why. Christie described it as the hardest of her books to write because of the difficulty of the plot and its solution.

The book first appeared in Britain in 1939 under a title drawn from the rhyme, and the present title, taken from the last line of the same rhyme, was used for the American edition and for almost everything since. It has been adapted for stage, film, television and radio more often than any other of her works.