Ten Little Niggers-Dieci piccoli indiani, Agatha Christie.
Eight people arrive on a small, isolated island off the Devon coast, each having received an unexpected personal invitation. They are met by the butler and cook-housekeeper, Thomas and Ethel Rogers, who explain that their hosts, Ulick Norman Owen and Una Nancy Owen, have not yet arrived, though they have left instructions.
A framed copy of an old rhyme hangs in every guest’s room, and on the dining room table sit ten figurines. After supper, a phonograph record is played; the recording accuses each visitor and Mr and Mrs Rogers of having committed murder, then asks if any of the “prisoners at the bar” wishes to offer a defence.
The guests discover that none of them know the Owenses, and Mr Justice Wargrave suggests that the name “U N Owen” is a play on “Unknown”. Marston finishes his drink and promptly dies of cyanide poisoning. Dr Armstrong confirms that there was no cyanide in the other drinks and suggests that Marston must have dosed himself.
The next morning, Mrs Rogers is found dead in her bed, and by lunchtime, General MacArthur has also died from a heavy blow to the head. The guests realise that the nature of the deaths corresponds with the respective lines of the rhyme, and three of the figurines are found to be missing.
The guests suspect that U N Owen may be systematically murdering them and search the island, but find no hiding places. Since no one else could have arrived or departed the island unassisted, they are forced to conclude that one of the seven remaining persons must be the killer. The next morning, Mr Rogers is found dead at the woodpile, and Emily Brent is found dead in the drawing room, having been injected with potassium cyanide.
After Wargrave suggests searching all the rooms, Lombard’s gun is found to be missing. Vera Claythorne goes up to her room and screams when she finds seaweed hanging from the ceiling. Most of the remaining guests rush upstairs; when they return they find Wargrave still downstairs, crudely dressed in the attire of a judge with a gunshot wound to the forehead. Dr Armstrong pronounces him dead.
That night, Lombard’s gun is returned, and Blore sees someone leaving the house. Armstrong is absent from his room. Vera, Blore, and Lombard decide to stick together and leave the house. When Blore returns for food, he is killed by a marble clock shaped like a bear that is pushed from Vera’s window sill. Vera and Lombard find Armstrong’s body washed up on the beach, and each concludes the other must be responsible. Vera suggests moving the body from the shore as a mark of respect, but this is a pretext to acquire Lombard’s gun. When Lombard lunges for it, she shoots him dead.
Vera returns to the house in a shaken, post-traumatic state. She finds a noose and chair arranged in her room and a powerful smell of the sea. Overcome by guilt, she hangs herself in accordance with the last line of the rhyme.
Scotland Yard officials arrive on the island to find nobody alive. They discover that the island’s owner, a sleazy lawyer and drug trafficker called Isaac Morris, had arranged the invitations and ordered the recording. However, he had died of a barbiturate overdose on the night the guests arrived. The police reconstruct the deaths with the help of the victims’ diaries and a coroner’s report. They are able to eliminate several suspects due to the circumstances of their deaths and items being moved afterward, but ultimately they cannot identify the killer.
Much later, a trawler hauls up in its nets a bottle containing a written confession. In it, Mr Justice Wargrave recounts that all his life he had had two contradictory impulses: a strong sense of justice and a savage bloodlust. He had satisfied both through his profession as a criminal judge, sentencing murderers to death following their trial. After receiving a diagnosis of a terminal illness, he decided to put into effect a private scheme to deal with a group of people he considered to have escaped justice.
Before departing for the island, he had given Morris a lethal dose of barbiturates for his indigestion. He had faked his death by gunshot with the assistance of Dr Armstrong under the pretext that it would help the group identify the killer. After killing Armstrong and the other remaining guests and moving objects to confuse the police, he finally committed suicide by shooting himself in the head, using the gun and some elastic to ensure that his true death matched the account of his staged death recorded in the guests’ diaries. Wargrave had written his confession and thrown it into the sea in a bottle in response to what he acknowledged to be his “pitiful human need” for recognition.
