The famous rhyme has a long history, at first not connected with Agatha Christie and the detective. In the 1860s, the American poet Septimus Winner composed the humorous song "10 Little Indians". After some time, the song ended up in Victorian England, where the Pesenician Frank poet Green replaced the little Indians with little people who are more understandable to the British. In this form, the rhyme returned to America and was published in 1890 as a children's book, which became a classic of American children's literature.
In the first version of the counting rhyme, the last Negro got married, lived happily ever after and gave birth to 10 Little Indians...
In the film, the counting rhyme sounds the same as in the work of Agatha Christie:
Nine blacks, eating, pecking their nose,
One could not wake up, there were eight of them left.
Eight are quiet in Devon left later,
One did not return, seven of them remained.
Seven blacks were chopped together,
One hacked himself to death - and there were six of them.
Six blacks went to the apiary for a walk,
One was stung by a bumblebee, there were five left.
Five blacksmanship was made,
They sentenced one, there are four of them.
Four blacks went swimming in the sea,
One fell for the bait, there were three of them left.
Three are quiet in the menagerie, they ended up,
One was grabbed by a bear, and two remained.
Two blacks lay down in the sun,
One burned down - and here is one, unhappy, lonely.
The last negro looked tired,
He hanged himself, and there was no one left.
The penultimate part of the rhyme in the film was not voiced.
The writer Agatha Christie wrote a detective story in 1939, and four years later the playwright Reginald Simpson asked permission to write a play based on her novel. The writer refused, saying that she would do it herself. For the theater production, she decided to remake the ending - to leave two characters alive, making them innocent. Vera Clayton and Philippe Lombard survived on the stage.
After the release of the novel, which instantly became a bestseller, the “blacks” began the process of turning back into “Indians” ... In the USA, for reasons of political correctness, Roman came under the name “and there was no one”, and would later be renamed “ten little Indians” and all ” Negro ”in the text were also replaced by“ little Indians ”. Despite the fact that films based on the detective film were shot many times and in different countries, the film adaptation by Stanislav Govorukhin was the only one that retained the original title and ending.
Filming took place in the Crimea. Mr. Owen's mansion was the famous Swallow's Nest. Part of the building was covered with a plywood decoration of the castle, built by employees of the Yalta film studio. Interior episodes were filmed in the Vorontsov Palace in Alupka, views of the Negro Island were filmed in the village of Gaspra, and the general plan of the island "played" a model in the pool.
Stanislav Govorukhin and Tatyana Drubich, in parallel with "Ten Little Indians", starred in "ACCE" with Sergei Solovyov. Fortunately, Solovyov filmed nearby, in Yalta, so the director and actress could leave for shooting. True, once after Stanislav Govorukhin, actress Lyudmila Maksakova directed the shooting of the episode, and Tatyana Drubich was replaced by a make-up artist in the final suicide scene - Judge Wargrave sees her legs when she opens the door to Vera Clayton's room. You can also notice that other stockings are on the understudy's legs ...
Butler Rogers, performed by Alexei Zolotnitsky, was hacked to death with an ax according to the plot. The actor in bloody make-up was asked to lie down in the rain before filming to enhance the effect. In this form, he was caught by a group of unsuspecting tourists who fled screaming as soon as the actor turned his head towards them.
At the very beginning of the film, an unknown person arranges figures of little Indians on a shiny tray. Only a hand in a black glove and a flickering indistinct reflection of a man's face are visible. The audience decided that this was the killer, looked for him among the heroes. However, it was the director of the film, Stanislav Govorukhin.
Your best work.
When the novel was released under the title "And there were none," ten little Indians from the counting rhyme were replaced by ten little Indians, also soldiers. And in the computer game of the same name, the counting rhyme was about ten little sailors.
PlotTen people who are completely strangers to each other are invited to the Negro Island. The owner of the house on the island is a certain Mr. Onim, who invited everyone on a different occasion. When the guests arrive on the island, Onim is not there. In the living room there is a tray with ten porcelain blacks, and in the room each of the guests is a children's counting about them: Ten blacks went to dinner, one choked, there were nine left. Nine blacks, eating, pecking their nose, one could not wake up, there were eight left. Eight blacks to Devon left later, one did not return, remained all the whole. Seven blacks were chopped together, chopped alone - and six of them were left. Six blacks went to the apiary, one stung bumblebee, there were five of them. Five blacksmanship was made, one was put on, there were four of them. Four blacks went swimming in the sea, One fell for the bait, there were three of them left. Three are black in the menagerie, they grabbed one a bear, and the two of them remained. Two blacks lay down in the sun, one burned - and here is one, unhappy, lonely. The last Negro looked tired, He went hanged himself, and there was no one. When the guests gather in the living room, the butler, on the written order of Onim left to him, turns on the gramophone. But instead of music, the guests hear the voice of Mr. Oneim, who accuses them all. According to the speaker, each invitee committed a murder in the past, but was not convicted (or even not brought to trial at all), because there was not enough evidence of his guilt.
The boat that brought the guests does not return and the guests get stuck on the island. The situation is complicated when the guests begin to die one after another in accordance with the children's counting about ten are blacks ... Marston dies first - he drinks whiskey, which turns out to be poisoned. At first, everyone thinks that Marston committed suicide, but this is strange: when everyone goes to bed, Rogers notes that one of the porcelain blacks disappeared. Subsequently, the negro children disappear with each death. When Dr. Armstrong announces the next morning that the butler's wife, Ethel Rogers, has died in her sleep, the guests begin to realize that Mr. The island is small and easy to search. Pawnshop, Blore, and Dr. Armstrong go searching for Mr. Oneim across the island, but find nothing. As everyone gathers in the living room for dinner, General MacArthur is discovered to be absent. The Doctor goes to call for him, but finds the General killed by a rock to the back of the head. Now no one doubts that a maniac is operating here. The judge declares that the killer is among the guests, since there is no one else on the island. No one had an alibi for the period of the general's death. The next morning, the butler Rogers is found at the barn with a hacked axe. That same morning, Emily Brent dies from an injection of poison. It is quickly revealed that Miss Brent was injected with Dr. Armstrong's syringe. At the same time, Lombard's revolver, which he brought with him, disappears. In the evening, the lights suddenly go out in the house. Vera goes up to her room, a minute later the others hear her screams. The men rush to Vera's room and find that she has passed out because she touched seaweed hanging from the ceiling in the dark. Faith is brought to consciousness and it is discovered that there is no judge. Returning to the room, they find the judge shot to death. Lombard then finds a revolver in his drawer. Dr. Armstrong disappears that night. Now the rest are sure that the doctor is the killer. In the morning they leave the house and stay on the rock. Blore says he's hungry and returns to the house for food. Vera and Lombard, noticing that Blore has been gone for a long time, return to the house and find Blore dead - a marble clock in the shape of a bear has been dropped on his head. They then find Armstrong's body on the beach - he has drowned. Only Vera and Lombard remain. Vera decides Lombard is the killer. She stealthily obtains his revolver and kills Philip. Vera returns to the house, confident that she is safe, goes into her room and sees a noose and a chair. In deep shock from what she experienced and saw, she rises to a chair and hangs herself ... EpilogueIn the epilogue, some time after the main events, the police arrive on the island, they find 10 corpses. Inspector Maine and Sir Thomas Lagg, employees of Scotland Yard, are trying to restore the chronology of events and unravel the mystery of the murders on the Negro island, in the end they come to a standstill. They suspect the last three:
Confession of a killerAfter the epilogue, a message follows that a few months after the events, a bottle with a message found by a fisherman was delivered to the police. The message reveals that Judge Wargrave was the killer. He planned all this in advance, invited people to the island and killed them. The judge persuaded Dr. Armstrong to fake his own murder in order to capture the real Onim. That's what they do. A short time later, Wargrave makes an appointment with the doctor at the rock. When Armstrong gets there, the judge pushes him off the cliff into the churning waves. At the end he shot himself. In his "repentance", Wargrave admits that he always dreamed of committing the "perfect crime", and he succeeded. He really wanted to “sentence” personally people who managed to escape punishment in a real court. In addition, Wargrave was terminally ill - he had cancer. The judge decided to write his message at the last moment, before committing suicide. CharactersThe characters are presented in the order in which they died (from top to bottom):
Minor heroes with at least one line:
The main ideas of the novel"Ten Little Indians" is not only an interesting detective story, but also a good psychological novel: the images of the characters are perfectly composed in it. Retribution for sinsThe crazy punisher punishes all the heroes for the crimes they have committed. The author wants to say that punishment comes for all sins, it is impossible to go unpunished after a murder. Retribution will overtake a person everywhere and always. The book also contains the phrase: Each of the characters throughout the novel gradually begins to realize his guilt, to remember the long-committed crime. The Perfect KillWargrave commits the perfect murder. He kills ten people (before coming to the island, he killed Archibald Morris - his tenth victim), and none of them even know who killer. His plan is executed exactly to the smallest detail, and even suicide is committed in the most ingenious way. In the epilogue, we see that the police finally come to a standstill and, if the manuscript was not found at sea, then the case would have remained unsolved. Wargrave is also recognized why he wrote a confession. So that everyone knows what a cunning crime has been committed, but most importantly because the judge is romantic and loves everything like this. Quotes
Screen adaptationsThe novel has been filmed numerous times. The first film adaptation was the American film And Then There Were None, filmed in 1945 by René Clair. The main difference from the novel was the ending, remade to look like a happy ending. Subsequent remakes of the film (1965, 1974 and 1989) under the title Ten Little Indians used the same ending. The only Soviet 2-episode television film, Ten Little Indians, directed by Stanislav Govorukhin (1987), used the novel's original title and fully followed the storyline with a dark ending. PlayThere is a 1943 play called And There Were None written by Agatha Christie. Consists of three acts. The play was staged in London with director Irene Hentschel. Also staged at the Broadway Theatre, directed by Albert de Corville. The text of the play is printed to this day. "Ten Little Indians" in RussianThe novel was translated into Russian not many times, but it was published in Russian in a separate publication many times. Mostly translated from English by L Bespalova. NotesLinks
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The writer considered this novel her best work and in 1943 wrote a play based on it. The novel is also Agatha Christie's best-selling novel, with about one hundred million copies sold worldwide.
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✪ Agatha Christie - Ten Little Indians. Audiobook detective
Subtitles
Plot
Ten complete strangers (except for one married couple) come to Negro Island at the invitation of Mr. and Mrs. A. N. Oneim (Alec Norman Oneim and Anna Nancy Oneim). There are no names on the island. In the living room there is a tray with ten porcelain blacks, and in the room each of the guests is a children's counter, reminiscent of “ten green bottles”:
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"Ten Little Indians"
(classical translation by Bespalova L. G.) Ten blacks went to dinner, Nine blacks, eating, pecking their nose, Eight are quiet in Devon left later, Seven blacks were chopped together, Six blacks went to the apiary for a walk, Five blacksmanship was made, Four blacks went to swim in the sea, Three are quiet in the menagerie, they ended up, Two blacks lay down in the sun, The last Negro looked tired, |
When the guests gather in the living room, the butler Rogers, on the written order of Onim left to him, turns on the gramophone. The guests hear a voice that accuses them of the murders they have committed.
- Dr. Armstrong operated on an elderly woman, Mary Elizabeth Kliis, while drunk, resulting in her death. - Emily Brent kicked out a young maid, Beatrice Taylor, after learning that she had become pregnant out of wedlock; the girl drowned. - Vera Claythorne was the nanny of Cyril Hamilton, who stood in the way of her lover Hugo to the inheritance. While swimming, Vera allowed the boy to swim behind the rock - as a result, he fell into the current and drowned. - Policeman William Henry Blore gave false testimony in court, which led to the imprisonment of the innocent Landor in hard labor, where he died a year later. - John Gordon MacArthur during the war he sent to certain death a subordinate, the lover of his wife, Arthur Richmond. - Philip Lombard abandoned 20 people, the natives of the East African tribe in the veld, having stolen all the provisions, left them to certain death. - Thomas and Ethel Rogers, serving with Miss Brady, an elderly sick woman, did not give her medicine in time; she died leaving the Rogers a small inheritance. - Anthony Marston ran over two children, John and Lucy Combs, in a car. - Lawrence John Wargrave sentenced to death Edward Seaton.
The boat that brought the guests does not return, a storm begins and the guests get stuck on the island. They begin to die one by one, in accordance with the children's rhyme about Negroes, whose figurines disappear with each death.
Marston dies first - potassium cyanide was found in a glass of whiskey. Rogers notes that one of the porcelain is black.
The next morning, Mrs. Rogers dies, a lethal dose of sleeping pills was mixed into her glass. The judge declares that Onim is most likely a dangerous maniac and a murderer. The men search the island and the house, but find no one. MacArthur is found dead. Wargrave states that the killer is among the guests, as there is no one else on the island. No one had an alibi for the period of the general's death.
In the morning, the butler Rogers is found hacked to death. That same morning, Emily Brent dies from an injection of potassium cyanide. Miss Brent was injected with Dr. Armstrong's syringe. At the same time, Lombard's revolver, which he brought with him, disappears.
Vera goes up to her room, a minute later the others hear her screams. The men rush to Vera's room and find that she has passed out because she touched seaweed hanging from the ceiling in the dark. Returning to the hall, they find the judge shot to death, wearing a red robe and wig. The pawnbroker finds a revolver in his drawer.
Dr. Armstrong disappears that night. Now the rest are sure that the doctor is the killer. In the morning they leave the house and stay on the rock. Blore returns to the house for food, Vera and Lombard hear a strange rumble. They find Blore dead - a bear-shaped marble clock has been dropped on his head. They then find Armstrong's body washed ashore by the tide.
Only Vera and Lombard remain. Vera decides Lombard is the killer. She gets his revolver and kills Philip. Vera returns to the house, confident that she is safe, goes into her room and sees a noose and a chair. In deep shock from what she experienced and saw, she rises to a chair and hangs herself.
Epilogue
Arriving on the island, the police finds 10 corpses. Inspector Maine and Sir Thomas Lagg from Scotland Yard try to reconstruct the chronology of events and unravel the mystery of the murders on the Negro island, in the end they come to a standstill. They build versions regarding the last killed:
- Armstrong exterminated everyone, after which he threw himself into the sea, his body was washed ashore by the tide. However, subsequent tides were lower and it was determined that the body was in the water for 12 hours.
- Philip Lombard brought the clock down on Blore's head, forced Vera to hang herself, returned to the beach (where his body was found) and shot himself. However, the revolver lay in front of the judge's room.
- William Blore shot Lombard and forced Vera to hang herself, after which he brought down the clock on his head. But no one chose this method of suicide and the police know that Blore was a scoundrel, he had no desire for justice.
- Vera Claythorne shot Lombard, threw a marble watch on Blore's head, and then hanged herself. But someone picked up the chair she had overturned and placed it against the wall.
Confession of a killer
The fishermen find the bottle with the letter and take it to Scotland Yard. The author of the letter is Judge Wargrave. Even in his youth, he dreamed of murder, but he was hampered by the desire for justice, which is why he became a lawyer. Being terminally ill, he decided to satisfy his passion and selected nine people who committed murders, but for some reason escaped punishment. The tenth was the criminal Isaac Morris, through whom Wargrave acquired the island. Before going to the island, the judge poisoned Morris. While on the island, he exterminated the others. After killing Miss Brent, he conspired with Armstrong, claiming he suspected Lombard. Armstrong helped the judge stage his death, after which the killer lured him onto a rock at night and threw him into the sea. Convinced that Vera had hanged herself, Wargrave went up to his room and shot himself, tying the revolver to the door with a rubber band and to the glasses that he put under him. After the shot, the rubber band got loose from the door and hung on the shackle of the glasses, the revolver fell at the threshold.
Characters
"Negro"
- Anthony Marston- a young guy. Likes to drive a car. Was invited by a friend.
- Ethel Rogers- wife of Thomas Rogers, cook.
- John MacArthur- the old general. Received an invitation to the island from old army comrades.
- Thomas Rogers- the Butler. Together with his wife, he was hired by Mr. Oneim.
- Emily Brent- elderly woman. I received an invitation written in illegible handwriting, I assumed that it was from an old friend.
- Lawrence John Wargrave- the old judge. A very smart and wise person.
- Edward Armstrong- Doctor from Harley Street. He was invited to work as a doctor for a solid fee.
- William Henry Blore- Retired Inspector. He was a scoundrel and always confident in his abilities.
- Philip Lombard- doing dirty work. Came to the island at the suggestion of Isaac Morris.
- Vera Claythorne- a young girl who came to the island at the suggestion of Mrs. Onim to become her secretary.
Minor Heroes
- Fred Narracott- Boat driver, brings guests to the island.
- Isaac Morris- The mysterious lawyer of Mr. Onim, organizes the crime, the tenth "negro". He dealt in drugs that killed the daughter of one of Wargrave's friends.
- Inspector Maine- Investigates the murders on the island in the novel's epilogue.
- Sir Thomas Legge- Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard.
- old sailor
- station worker
- Hugo Hamilton- Faith Claythorne's lover, Cyril's uncle. After the death of the boy, he inherited the title and fortune, but, guessing that Vera had deliberately released Cyril to the rock in the open sea, he severed all relations with her. It is from Hugo Lawrence that Wargrave learns of Faith's crime.
In culture
Play
In 1943, Agatha Christie wrote a three-act play entitled And There Were None. The play was staged in London with director Irene Hentschel. It premiered at the New Wimbledon Theater on 20 September 1943 before moving to the Wes End on 17 November 1943 at the St. James Theatre. The play received good reviews and ran for 260 performances until February 24, 1944, when a bomb hit the theater. Then on February 29 the production was transferred to the Cambridge Theater and ran there until May 6, after which it returned to St. James on May 9 and finally closed on July 1.
The play was also staged on Broadway at the Broadhurst Theater by director Albert de Corville, but under the title Ten Little Indians. The premiere took place on June 27, 1944, and on January 6, 1945, the production moved to the Plymouth Theater and ran there until June 30. There were 426 performances in total on Broadway.
The text of the play is printed to this day. For staging reasons, the names of some characters and their crimes are changed in the play, and, unlike the novel, the play ends with a happy ending. Vera, unknowingly, only wounds Lombard when she shoots him, after which she is confronted by an assassin (the killer's identity has not been changed), who tells her that he took a slow-acting poison, and when he dies, Vera will have nothing left except how to commit suicide so as not to be arrested. Lombard shows up, kills the killer with a gun, which Vera drops after she thinks she killed him, and that's where the play ends. For the sake of such an ending, when the play was transferred to the big screen (during the film adaptation), Vera's crime and Lombard's biography were changed - Vera is suspected of the death of her sister's husband, but from the very beginning she says that she has nothing to do with this, and Lombard admits in the finale that in fact, he is not Philip Lombard, but his friend Charles Morley, and that the real Philip Lombard committed suicide, but Charles found his invitation to the Negro Island and came here under his guise, thinking that this would help solve the mystery of his suicide. This ending was used in the first film adaptation of 1945 and then used in all subsequent ones, except for the Soviet 1987. In the play itself, Lombard remains Lombard, and the crimes of which Vera and Philip are accused are identical to the crimes in the novel.
Screen adaptations
The novel has been filmed numerous times. The first film adaptation was the American film "And there was none left", filmed in 1945 by Rene Clair. The main difference from the novel was the ending, remade to a happy ending based on the one that Agatha Christie wrote for the play, with only one difference: Lombard suggests Vera fake his murder beforehand, after which Vera intentionally shoots past Lombard, since they are standing outside at home and the killer from the window cannot hear what they were talking about. Subsequent remakes of the film (1965 and 1989), titled Ten Little Indians and Ten Little Indians, used the same ending. Only the Soviet 2-episode film "Ten Little Indians" directed by Stanislav Govorukhin (1987) used the original title of the novel and fully corresponded to the storyline with a gloomy ending.
In December 2015, the British mini-series And There Were No One was released on BBC One, which became the first English-language film adaptation to use the original ending of the novel.
Collins Crime Club
Word
AST, Eksmo, Manager, Azbuka
256 (first edition)
978-0-00-713683-4
Plot
Ten complete strangers (except for one married couple) come to Negro Island at the invitation of Mr. and Mrs. A. N. Oneim (Alec Norman Oneim and Anna Nancy Oneim). There are no names on the island. In the living room there is a tray with ten porcelain blacks, and in the room each of the guests hangs a children's counting, resembling ten green bottles:
| Ten blacks decided to dine, one suddenly choked - there were nine left. Nine blacks, eating, pecking their nose, one could not wake up - there were eight left. Eight blacks to Devon went away, one did not return - they remained all the whole. Seven blacks were chopped together, chopped alone - and six of them were left. Six blacks went to the apiary, one stung bumblebee - there were five of them. Five blacksmanship was made, one was put on, there were four of them. Four blacks went swimming in the sea, One fell for the bait - there were three of them left. Three blacks in the menagerie were, one grabbed a bear - and the two of them remained. Two blacks lay down in the sun, one burned - and here is one, unhappy, lonely. The last Negro looked tired, went and hanged himself, and there was no one left. |
When the guests gather in the living room, the butler Rogers, on the written order of Onim left to him, turns on the gramophone. The guests hear a voice that accuses them of the murders they have committed.
- Dr. Armstrong operated on an elderly woman, Mary Elizabeth Kliis, while drunk, resulting in her death.
- Emily Brent kicked out a young maid, Beatrice Taylor, after learning that she had become pregnant out of wedlock; the girl drowned.
- Vera Claythorne was the nanny of Cyril Hamilton, who stood in the way of her lover Hugo to the inheritance. While swimming, Vera allowed the boy to swim behind the rock - as a result, he fell into the current and drowned.
- Policeman William Henry Blore gave false testimony in court, which led to the imprisonment of the innocent Landor in hard labor, where he died a year later.
- John Gordon MacArthur during the war he sent to certain death a subordinate, the lover of his wife, Arthur Richmond.
- Philip Lombard abandoned 20 people, the natives of the East African tribe in the veld, having stolen all the provisions, left them to certain death.
- Thomas and Ethel Rogers, serving with Miss Brady, an elderly sick woman, did not give her medicine in time; she died leaving the Rogers a small inheritance.
- Anthony Marston ran over two children, John and Lucy Combe, in a car.
- Lawrence John Wargrave sentenced to death Edward Seaton.
The boat that brought the guests does not return, a storm begins and the guests get stuck on the island. They begin to die one by one, in accordance with the children's rhyme about Negroes, whose figurines disappear with each death.
Marston dies first - there was potassium cyanide in a glass of whiskey. Rogers notes that one of the porcelain is black.
The next morning, Mrs. Rogers dies, a lethal dose of sleeping pills was mixed into her glass. The judge declares that Onim is most likely a dangerous maniac and a murderer. The men search the island and the house, but find no one. MacArthur is found dead. Wargrave states that the killer is among the guests, as there is no one else on the island. No one had an alibi for the period of the general's death.
In the morning, the butler Rogers is found hacked to death. That same morning, Emily Brent dies from an injection of potassium cyanide, a bumblebee crawls on the glass. Miss Brent was injected with Dr. Armstrong's syringe. At the same time, Lombard's revolver, which he brought with him, disappears.
Vera goes up to her room, a minute later the others hear her screams. The men rush to Vera's room and find that she has passed out because she touched seaweed hanging from the ceiling in the dark. Returning to the hall, they find the judge shot to death, wearing a red robe and wig. The pawnbroker finds a revolver in his drawer.
Dr. Armstrong disappears that night. Now the rest are sure that the doctor is the killer. In the morning they leave the house and stay on the rock. Blore returns to the house for food, Vera and Lombard hear a strange rumble. They find Blore dead - a bear-shaped marble clock has been dropped on his head. They then find Armstrong's body washed ashore by the tide.
Only Vera and Lombard remain. Vera decides Lombard is the killer. She gets his revolver and kills Philip. Vera returns to the house, confident that she is safe, goes into her room and sees a noose and a chair. In deep shock from what she experienced and saw, she rises to a chair and hangs herself ...
Epilogue
Arriving on the island, the police finds 10 corpses. Inspector Maine and Sir Thomas Lagg from Scotland Yard try to reconstruct the chronology of events and unravel the mystery of the murders on the Negro island, in the end they come to a standstill. They build versions regarding the last killed:
- Armstrong exterminated everyone, after which he threw himself into the sea, his body was washed ashore by the tide. However, subsequent tides were lower and it was determined that the body was in the water for 12 hours.
- Phillip Lombard brought the clock down on Blore's head, forced Vera to hang herself, returned to the beach (where his body was found) and shot himself. However, the revolver was lying in front of the judge's room.
- William Blore shot Lombard and forced Vera to hang herself, after which he brought down the clock on his head. But no one chose this method of suicide and the police know that Blore was a scoundrel, he had no desire for justice.
- Vera Claythorne shot Lombard, threw a marble watch on Blore's head, and then hanged herself. But someone picked up the chair she had overturned and placed it against the wall.
Confession of a killer
The fishermen find the bottle with the letter and take it to Scotland Yard. The author of the letter is Judge Wargrave. Since his youth, he dreamed of murder, but his desire for justice prevented him, which is why he became a judge. Being terminally ill, he decided to satisfy his passion and selected ten people who committed murders, but for some reason escaped punishment. The tenth was the criminal Isaac Morris, through whom Wargrave acquired the island. Before being sent to the island, the judge poisoned Morris. While on the island, he exterminated the others. After killing Miss Brent, he conspired with Armstrong, claiming he suspected Lombard. Armstrong helped the judge stage his death, after which the killer lured him onto a rock at night and threw him into the sea. Convinced that Vera had hanged herself, Wargrave went up to his room and shot himself, tying the revolver to the door with a rubber band and to the glasses that he put under him. After the shot, the rubber band got loose from the door and hung on the shackle of the glasses, the revolver remained at the threshold.
Characters
"Negro"
- Anthony Marston- a young guy. Likes to drive a car.
- Ethel Rogers- wife of Thomas Rogers, cook.
- John MacArthur- the old general. Resigned to the idea of dying. He often thought of his late wife Leslie.
- Thomas Rogers- the Butler. Together with his wife, he was hired by Mr. Oneim.
- Emily Brent- elderly woman. Biblical fanatic; She was certain that death would pass her by.
- Lawrence John Wargrave- the old judge. A very smart and wise man, at some point he was investigating the murders on the island.
- Edward Armstrong- Doctor from Harley Street. Pretty weak person. Has an addiction to alcohol.
- William Henry Blore- Retired Inspector. He was a scoundrel and always confident in his abilities.
- Philip Lombard- doing dirty work. Came to the island at the suggestion of Isaac Morris.
- Vera Claythorne- a young girl who came to the island at the suggestion of Mrs. Onim to become her secretary.
Minor Heroes
- Fred Narracott- Boat driver, brings guests to the island.
- Isaac Morris- The mysterious lawyer of Mr. Onim, organizes the crime, the tenth "negro". He dealt in drugs that killed the daughter of one of Wargrave's friends.
- Inspector Maine- Investigates the murders on the island in the novel's epilogue.
- Sir Thomas Legge- Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard.
- old sailor
- station worker
- All characters in the novel, including the killer, die.
- The book has gained great fame around the world and is considered the best work of Agatha Christie.
- Despite the fact that the name of the novel was changed, it is still known to this day under the name "Ten Little Indians" and was published under this title in many countries.
In culture
Play
There is a 1943 play called And There Were None, written by Agatha Christie. Consists of three acts. The play was staged in London with director Irene Hentschel. It premiered at the New Wimbledon Theater on 20 September 1943, before moving to the Wes End on 17 November the same year at the St. James Theatre. The play received good reviews and ran for 260 performances until February 24, 1944, when a bomb hit the theater. Then on February 29 the production was transferred to the Cambridge Theater and ran there until May 6, after which it returned to St. James on May 9 and finally closed on July 1.
The play was also staged on Broadway at the Broadhurst Theater by director Albert de Corville, but under the title Ten Little Indians. The premiere took place on June 27, 1944, and on January 6 the production moved to the Plymouth Theater and ran there until June 30. There were 426 performances in total on Broadway.
The text of the play is printed to this day. For staging reasons, the names of some characters and their crimes are changed in the play, and, unlike the novel, the play ends with a happy ending. Vera, unknowingly, only wounds Lombard when she shoots him, after which she is confronted by an assassin (the killer's identity has not been changed), who tells her that he took a slow-acting poison, and when he dies, Vera will have nothing left except how to commit suicide so as not to be arrested. Lombard shows up, kills the killer with a gun, which Vera drops after she thinks she killed him, and that's where the play ends. For the sake of such an ending, Vera's crime and Lombard's biography were changed - in the play, Vera is suspected of the death of her sister's husband, but from the very beginning she says that she has nothing to do with this, and Lombard admits in the final that he is not really Philip Lombard, and his friend Charles Morley, and that the real Philip Lombard died a mysterious death shortly before, but Charles found his invitation to Negro Island and came here under his guise, thinking that this would help solve the mystery of his death. This ending was used in the first film adaptation of 1945 and then used in all subsequent ones, except for the Soviet 1987.
Screen adaptations
The novel has been filmed numerous times. The first film adaptation was the American film And Then There Were None, filmed in 1945 by René Clair. The main difference from the novel was the ending, remade to a happy ending based on the one that Agatha Christie wrote for the play, with only one difference: Lombard suggests Vera fake his murder beforehand, after which Vera intentionally shoots past Lombard, since they are standing outside at home and the killer from the window cannot hear what they were talking about. Subsequent remakes of the film (1965, 1974 and 1989) under the title Ten Little Indians/Indians used the same ending. Only the Soviet 2-episode television movie Ten Little Indians directed by Stanislav Govorukhin (1987) used the original title of the novel and fully corresponded to the storyline with a gloomy ending.
Computer game
see also
- Children's counting rhymes
Notes
Links
| Ten Little Indians (novel) at Wikiquote |
- Ten Little Indians in Maxim Moshkov's Library
- Ten Indians on the site www.agatachristie.ru
| Works by Agatha Christie | ||
|---|---|---|
| Characters | Hercule Poirot · Miss Marple · Tommy and Tuppence · Ariadne Oliver · Arthur Hastings · Superintendent Battle · Chief Inspector Japp · Parker Pine · Mr. Harley Keane · Colonel Flight | |
| Novels | The Mystery at Stiles The Mysterious Enemy The Golf Course Murder The Man in the Brown Suit The Chimneys Castle Mystery The Murder of Roger Ackroyd The Big Four The Blue Train Mystery The Seven Dial Mystery The Vicarage Murder The Sittaford Mystery The Endhouse Mystery · Death of Lord Edgware · Murder on the Orient Express · Why not Evans? Three Act Tragedy Death in the Clouds Alphabet Murder Murder in Mesopotamia Cards on the Table Silent Witness Death on the Nile Encounter with Death Ten blacks· Easy to Kill · Hercule Poirot's Christmas · Sad Cypress · Evil Under the Sun · N or M? · One, two, buckle barely holding on · Body in Library · Five Little Pigs · One Finger · One Hour Zero · Death Comes at the End · Glittering Cyanide · Hollow · Lucky Beach · Crooked House · Murder Announced · Baghdad Meetings · Mrs. McGinty Lost Her Life · With the help of mirrors · After the funeral · A pocket full of rye · Destination unknown · Hickory Dickory Dock · Dead Man's Stupidity · At 4.50 from Paddington · Trial of Innocence · A Cat among Pigeons · White Horse Villa · And in the Cracks is a Circle of Mirrors · A Clock · Caribbean Mystery · Bertram's Hotel · The Third Girl · Endless Night · Click Only Once · Halloween Party · Passenger from Frankfurt · Nemesis · Elephants Can Remember · Gate of Doom · Curtain · Forgotten Murder | |
| Novels (under the name Mary Westmacott) |
The Giants' Bread · Unfinished Portrait · Parted in the Spring · Rose and Yew · Daughter Has a Daughter · Burden | |
| Storybooks | ||
Francisco Goya, Blind Man's Buff, 1789
This poem owes much of its fame (at least to us) to the detective novel of the same name by Agatha Christie, first published in 1939. Let me remind you that it is about ten heroes, whom some unknown person treacherously lures and isolates in a hotel on a deserted island. After that, the guests die in turn - and not just like that, but following a children's counting rhyme.
The text of this rhyme hangs in every hotel room and reads as follows:
Ten blacks went to dinner,In addition, there is a dish with porcelain figurines of Negro children in the inn, and after each kill, one figurine disappears.
One choked, there were nine left.
Nine blacks, eating, pecking their nose,
One could not wake up, there were eight of them left.
Eight are quiet in Devon left later,
One did not return, seven of them remained.
Seven blacks were chopped together,
One killed himself - and there were six of them. v six blacks went to the apiary, walking,
One was stung by a bumblebee, there were five left.
Five blacksmanship was made,
They sentenced one, there are four of them.
Four blacks went to swim in the sea,
One fell for the bait, there are three of them left. *
Three are quiet in the menagerie, they ended up,
One was grabbed by a bear, and two remained. V of two blacks lay down in the sun,
One burned down - and here is one, unhappy, lonely. v The last negro looked tired,
He hanged himself, and there was no one left.In the original text, this line looks very different: “A red herring swallowed one ... (“One was swallowed by a red herring ...”). But this is only at first glance. It turns out that in English the expression “red herring” has a double meaning and also means “false trail; distraction maneuver. It is on the bait of the judge that the doctor falls for and dies in the novel.
It must be said that in British literature there were other knockout rhymes. For example, "Ten green bottles":
However, the rhyme about Indians was born on the other side of the Atlantic - in the USA (why it mentions frankly English Devon is not entirely clear). By the time the novel was published, the counting rhyme already had a long history and was well known in Europe (Agatha Christie had known her since childhood).
Ten bottles stood on the wall
One of them fell
Only nine left...
The first edition of A. Christie's "Ten Little Indians" Photo: cover scan
It all started in 1849, when the American songwriter Septimus Winner published the lyrics of a song called "Old John Brown". There were neither deaths nor poorly in it. The plot was extremely unpretentious. First, a certain “old man John Brown” met little Indians, after which a counting refrain followed: “One little, two little, three little Injuns ...”, etc. (“Injuns” instead of “Indians” is not a mistake, but an errative , i.e., a conscious distortion of the word - like "padonkov's language").
From the 1924 edition Photo: illustrated by Clara Atwood, flickr.com
In 1868 Winner remade the song into "Ten Little Injuns". The refrain remained the same, but a familiar descending plot appeared. Some deaths were national in color - for example, one Indian died from drinking, and another fell overboard a canoe. However, the last Indian was lucky - he met his "squaw" and got married.
The details of the ending sometimes varied. In one version, the couple again produced 10 Indians, in another, after marriage, the line followed: “and then there were none” (“and no one was left”). Either this is a hint that there is no life after marriage, or that "the crown is the end of a fairy tale."
In 1869, another songwriter, Frank J. Green, revised Winner's text and, together with composer Mark Mason, wrote a song for the so-called. minstrel show. At that time, a genre called "Blackface" was popular on the American stage - white performers painted their faces black and portrayed blacks on stage, stupidly grimacing and distorting the English language.
In this regard, the "little Indians" in Green's version were replaced by "negroes", and the plot was already fully consistent with the one we find in A. Christie's novel.
Photo: 19th century cover, wikimedia.org
По иронии судьбы «чернолицый» коллектив, который популяризовал в Англии песенку «Ten Little Niggers», тоже звали КРИСТИ - точнее, CHRISTY MINSTRELS.
The rhyme quickly moved into the category of children's literature and spread around the world in the form of books with vivid illustrations. It was believed that thanks to her, children not only master arithmetic, but also learn not to commit rash acts.
The fact that the moralizing was of a rather cruel nature did not bother anyone at that time. However, the American publishing house "McLoughlin Brothers" in 1895 nevertheless revised Green's text and made the ending more optimistic - as in Winner's version, the last hero did not die, but got married.
К 1930−40-м годам слово «nigger» в США становится неполиткорректным, и считалка публикуется только в «индейском» варианте - причём, как правило, самом раннем («Раз - индеец, два - индеец…»). This is how we hear her in the 1933 Disney cartoon Old King Kohl.
In this regard, when the first American edition of Christie's novel was published in 1940, its title was changed to "And Then There Were None" ("And there was none left"). The American film adaptation of 1945 was also called. The text of the rhyme remained the same as in the original, except for the replacement of Negroes by Indians.
I must say that this film is generally quite funny - a creepy story was flavored with a fair amount of humor and even had a ... happy ending. Sometimes the plot of the film adaptations changed so much that the rhyme had to be corrected. For example, in the 1965 British remake of Ten Little Indians, the characters find themselves not on an island, but in a mountain hotel that can only be reached by cable car. Since some of the deaths did not correlate well with the original rhyme, two lines had to be changed to "one of them escaped" (the hero dies trying to escape on the cable car) and "one met the pussy" (the hero dies chasing the cat).
The rhyme about the Indians was also reflected in pop music. For example, in 1954, Bill Haley turned it into groovy rock and roll.And in 1962, the BEACH BOYS wrote a surf rock hit based on it with original lyrics, where 10 little Indians are trying to win the heart of an Indian woman.
In 1967, singer Harry Nilsson offered his original interpretation of the counting rhyme. In his version, the Indians died, violating ten biblical commandments in turn: "one stood and looked at the wife of another" (adultery), "one took his neighbor's goods" (theft), "one told a lie about the other" ("perjury"), etc. In the same year, Nilsson's song was recorded by the YARDBIRDS group.
The most witty was the song of the German punk band DIE TOTEN HOSEN "Zehn kleine Jagermeister" ("Ten little Jägermeisters"), released in 1996.
Its name is directly related to the German brand of liqueur "Jagermeister". It is not for nothing that in the animated video it is not huntsmen who die at all, but deer (the logo of this drink). Despite the abundance of "black humor", everything sounds recklessly and positively.
…One day everyone will dieInterestingly, when Hitler came to power, his opponents composed a new version of the rhyme - "Zehn kleine Meckerlein" ("Ten little grumblers"), in which the characters disappeared as soon as they began to criticize the Nazis. However, in the end, all grumblers meet ... in the dungeons of the Dachau concentration camp.
- Don't pay attention.
This is how life works - you or me ...
German edition 1885. Photo: Christian Wilhelm Allers, wikimedia.org
In 1965, Vladimir Vysotsky performed his version of this anti-fascist rhyme on the stage of the Taganka Theater in the play “The Fallen and the Living”. The text differed from the original in places, but the end was more encouraging.One day ten grumblers
Decided to have lunch
One said that Goebbels is lying,
And there are nine left...
Last of ten
I was terribly lonely
But soon nine others
I was able to meet in Dachau.
An interesting and tragic story has a Jewish analogue of the counting rhyme, composed by musician Mark Rosenberg.... Adolf decided - well, they are kaput,
They will not play tricks.
But grumblers - and there, and here,
There are ten million of them.
Based on the Yiddish folk song “Tsen Brider” (“10 brothers”) and the plot logic of “10 Little Indians”, he described the story of 10 Jewish brothers who try to trade different goods, but fail every time.
The author of the translation is Zeev Dashevsky:
Rosenberg composed this song in 1942, being ... in the dungeons of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and even rehearsed it with an underground choir. The following year, the musician and members of the choir were sent to the gas chamber, but the song survived.We went, ten brothers, to work with excise duty.
One, poor fellow, died, and we need to reduce the score ...
I trade candles, and again - not good.
I'll probably die of hunger soon too.
As for the original rhym about ten are black, then his first translation into Russian, apparently, belongs to Samuel Marshak (“Ten blacks bathed ...”). True, during the life of the writer it was never published and first appeared in the second volume of Works for Children (1968). Marshak's version turned out to be very free, although in some places the writer adheres to the original storylines (court, bees, menagerie).
In some unknown way, the counting rhyme even penetrated Russian courtyard folklore. As a rule, it was a song where the place of the Negroes was occupied by piglets, which are monotonously drowning:
This continues until the last verse, where the text loops and turns into an analogue of an endless fairy tale about a white bull:Ten little pigs went swimming in the sea
Ten piglets frolicked in the open.
One of them drowned
They bought him a coffin.
And here is the result:
Nine piglets…
Today, Russia has remained a rare country where an Agatha Christie novel is published under the original title.But he went down.
And I met a pig there ...
And here is the result:
Ten piglets.
Когда в 1987 году Станислав Говорухин выпустил свой фильм «Десять негритят», слово «nigger» в анлосаксонском мире было уже давно вне закона. And soon the word "Indian" became intolerant - the expression "Native American" ("Native American") is now used instead.
Author: Sergey Kuriy
