Ten Little Niggers

And Then There Were None is a 1939 mystery novel by the English writer Agatha Christie. It is the world's best-selling mystery novel and one of the best-selling books of all time, with more than 100 million copies sold by 2007. It has been adapted for film, television, radio, theatre, and other media more often than any other of Christie's works. In 2015, it was named the "World's Favourite Christie" in a global vote organised by the author's estate. The story takes place on an isolated island off the coast of Devon. Ten individuals are accused of past crimes and are killed one by one according to the lines of a popular rhyme. Christie described the book as the most difficult of her novels to write because of the complexity of the plot and its solution, and regarded it as a better piece of craftsmanship than anything else she had written. The novel received largely positive reviews on first publication, with critics praising the ingenuity of its plot, and it has since been frequently named among the greatest crime novels ever written. In 1990 the Crime Writers' Association ranked it nineteenth on its list of the best crime novels, and in 1995 the Mystery Writers of America placed it tenth on a comparable list. The book was first published in the United Kingdom by Collins Crime Club in 1939 as Ten Little Niggers, after an 1869 minstrel song that forms the central element of the plot. It appeared in the UK under that title until 1985. The first American edition, published in 1940, was called And Then There Were None from the start, as the original was considered unacceptably racially loaded in the United States; the book was also issued there as Ten Little Indians between 1964 and 1986. Later editions in both countries revised the text and the rhyme to remove the original racial language, and the novel is now published in English only as And Then There Were None.