5/19/2023 0 Comments 10 little indian agatha christie![]() ![]() ![]() It’s ironic that naming this mystery proves as difficult as solving it: a tribute to its troubling, nightmarish quality. The novel was a deserved bestseller, in spite of its original title, based on a nursery rhyme containing a racist slur, but renamed for the 1945 film version as And Then There Were None (the novel’s title today) and in this 1965 version as Ten Little Indians, which has the virtue of referencing the important nursery rhyme, but suffers from containing another, different racial slur. Halfway through the drama, the survivors realise that their host is one of them: factions form, mutual suspicion replaces cooperation and the deaths continue until only two remain, confronting one another, baffled and betrayed. ![]() ![]() The Grand Old Lady of crime thrillers brings together ten people, eight guests and two servants, at a remote mansion, where they are murdered one by one, in penance for past crimes uncovered by their unknown host, the coyly code-named Mr U.N. The story is so elemental that it’s curious that it took until 1939 for Agatha Christie to arrive at the definitive form. If we are the apex predator, it’s by dint of cooperation, but as predators are we doomed to turn on each other? Then, the refinement of terror, that the Beast is not out there, furred and fanged, but present within the circle of light: one of us, wearing human skin, is the Beast. I t’s the world’s oldest horror story, told (I imagine) by Stone Age hunters, gathered around a fire, while predators circle them in the night. ![]()
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