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Agatha Christie wrote many books featuring Miss Marple and Poirot, but she also gave us many mysteries in which neither character appeared. And Then There Were None, originally called Ten Little Niggers and then Ten Little Indians, was the most important one (it was also made into a movie several times). It features ten strangers who are invited to a mysterious and remote island. The strangers have something in common: they have all been, in one way or another, responsible for the death of another person. The strangers gather, guilt-ridden and paranoid, to find danger on the island. A tape recording in the house tells them that fate knows each of their sins, and that they shall soon be put to justice. The recording then recites a nursery rhyme that starts like this: "Ten little Indian boys went out to dine, one choked his little self and then there were nine . . ., " and it of course ends, "And then there were none." Then the strangers start dying one by one, just as the nursery rhyme says they would: the first one chokes during dinner, and so on. The police arrive on the island after a few weeks only to find ten bodies, and to discover that no boats had left or arrived at the island since the gathering of the ten strangers.
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