i feel the most for him. his wife cheated on him and then he was left all alone after her death. the scene in the book when he calls out to leslie has to be one of the most heartbreaking moments in books for me

exactly, hes the best out of all the other characters

He and Lombarde were also the only ones accused of killing someone who gave you an idea of what happened.

The happy ending came from the play version of the book, which Agatha Christie wrote herself. She changed it because the play took place in 1943 when ww2 was still ongoing. The idea was along the lines of "why let people watch a play where everyone dies when you can see that in real life already?". So even if the title doesn't fit the ending, it's honestly pretty sweet of Christie to do that even when she didn't need to. edit: typo

​​@@_silience and the problem with changing that ending is that although people mainly used that good ending as the ending when directing shows people often changed endings and on the 125th anniversary of Agathas birth, her grandson published a good ending of the play that she originally wrote which has been uses more in recent years in theatre. I personally prefer the bad ending if the play as its truer to the novel. The good ending is naff.

​@@_silienceTHIS. people are obsessed with being "realistic" and "tragic" and try to insist that its better than happy endings. But if fiction and art is supposed to take you away from reality, then why be realistic? There is so much death in the world, why be made aware of it all the time? Happiness exists, success exists. But ppl cant seem to accept that

It’s criminal!

Never knew there was a ’good ending’ the og has already a great ending in my opinion😅

I actually have one or two characters whom I like in the story. I recognize them as bad guys deserving punishment, but I am also partly rooting for them as protagonists-not very different from watching The Americans, Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, etc.

well I think it's important to differentiate between good people and likeable characters. Objectively, all of the characters featured range from questionable to morally reprehensible, but I actually liked a lot of them lol. The judge was definitely a sociopath but I thought he was really funny and interesting, the old general seemed like a good dude that just made a bad choice out of bitterness, etc.

This a really fascinating point! No one is truly innocent on the island. I will say I did like the Doctor though, I feel like out of all of them he felt the most true remorse and actually had attempted to reform his life. Still far from perfect of course. I felt a good bit of sympathy for the general too.

I have several characters that I like in the novel: 1) Phillip Lombart. I like him the most. He's sharp, confident, and honest. He staightforwardly admitted his wrongdoing. He's also very handsome in my imagination (Aidan Turner is as handsome as Phillip Lombart could be😍). 2) General McArthur. His wife was cheated on him. Of course he wanted to kill the other guy. 3) Dr. Amstrong. Like someone else wrote in the comment, I thought he really regretted what he had done and had turned his life for the better since. 4) Justice Wargrave. Actually, I kind of dislike him because he killed General McArthur and Dr. Amstrong. And the one I dislike the most: Emily Brent. Cannot stand the Karen type.

No. They were are good people somehow. They were normal people. They were us. The reckless driver was the only I could not tolerate. The others I could see how it was “ok” in their minds to kill.

Yes. He goes out of his way to distance himself from the others. The crime that he accused himself of committing, the sentencing of an innocent man to death, was not a crime. The man was guilty and he did his job as a judge. His other killings he also justified as they were all guilty of a crime that the law wouldn't punish them for so he did it as justice. The others had all killed or lead to the deaths of the innocent. He was not one of them in his eyes.

@@davidalexander3320 I understand, but I disagree, which is the genius of his confession. He does acknowledge that he killed them while not have committed the act the "kills" him. However, in the end he states that he could not go unpunished, because though he desired to bring these people to justice, he was motivated by murderous intent and premeditation. This places him firmly among his victims, aside from the young fool who killed by accident but still without remorse. He also places himself as the last after the death of Vera because each "victim" had committed worse acts than the previous. As he had conspired to murder no fewer than 10 unsuspecting people and succeeding, it was fitting that he should be the one to arrange the final tableau including his own demise.

If it were as you say, Wargrave would try to save himself. What point would it be killing himself with the rest of the group?

@@jayt9608 except he didn't count himself among his victims. He explicitly states "I needed a 10th victim" and that 10th he says was Morris. He didn't leave himself until the end because he was the worst offender. He did itnso he could enjoy his work and write his letter.

@@elisabettanucifora616 he had a terminal illness and was going to die soon anyway. Also if he had left there would be no mystery. He had to be among the dead.

Axe to the head is not painful? Being thrown from the cliff?

I don’t think it could be done for several reasons. He said he would never hire a white lead or leads for a film bc he’s said he’s already seen that. I also don’t know how the racial themes could be played out unless the entire cast was white unfortunately. Maybe there could be some changes where a few of the characters are mixed race but ‘passing.’ The racial themes are ever present but more subtle. Therefore, internet mobs would have a field day if say the ordinal name or Indian name was used. With the rhyme being ever so present, what should it be called?

@@Garbeaux. Having a cast with white/white-passing and non-white folx would not necessarily negatively affect the colonial themes of ATTWN--it might even help bring them into focus & add some nuance *if* done well. Race is a created concept intended to support European colonization of "non-European" peoples--colonialism uses race as a tool, but the prime motivators are greed and self-serving indifference, which are found in all humans (that's part of the novel's point, no?). It is quite possible to be racist against one's own self--colonialism depends on it to outsource the management of a colony. There are always some people who will throw their own kindred under the bus for personal gain--'successful' colonization requires that the colonized eventually come to mentally justify their own colonization and value resource extraction as an end in and of itself. Assimilation, acquiescence, and exercises in pro-colonizer apologetics are actively & strongly rewarded. The US government was always able to find a few Indigenous folx to sign a treaty--even after it had been publicly voted down--to give themselves a legal pretext for Removal. As a case in point, a number of our tribal governments were designed to ensure sympathizers of the colonial project within our communities are the ones in charge. Adapting the novel to include characters with backgrounds that also include mundane, everyday-betrayals of their own people for the benefit of appearing good in the eyes of the colonizers would fit in the general theme nicely--but it would be difficult to do well and not a little dangerous. It would also be very interesting to have at least one white character who views themselves as an 'ally', but who is actually someone who perpetuates harm to BIPOC communities and is totally and entirely oblivious to it (these people pop up frequently on the Rez, and are possibly the most difficult people to deal with. They're so convinced they're helping us!) As for the rhyme, I think it's actually possible to use "10 little soldiers" and remain true to the theme IF it is clearly indicated in the script that the 'soldiers' are 'soldiers of colonialism'--that one aspect of their inhumanity is in fact having been a stooge for the colonizing project. I have on occasion heard a fellow Indigenous person disparaged as 'a soldier in the white man's army'; sometimes that's literal, most of the time it's a metaphor. I do agree the likelihood of a successful adaptation of ATTWN along these lines is...not very likely. There is such a long history of roping in a few BIOPC folx so directors/producers can say "look at us being all anti-colonial!" while still managing to malign the BIOPC folx they're supposed to be representing--without even touching on films that use BIPOC cast in films that flatly disparage BIPOC folx as part of the plot. Also, while this sort of adaptation could serve as a good reminder to BIPOC folx that we have a duty to monitor ourselves for ways we're unintentionally contributing to upholding systems of oppression, it's probably not best done via the medium of blockbuster films...but perhaps some day

The modern version of this is Knives Out. Great social and political commentary, probably what you're looking for with the "Jordan Peel adapts And Then There Was None" 👍

@@Garbeaux. I disagree 100 percent. Race doesn’t need to be seen through the eyes of a white person. Race is (most of the time) seen through the eyes of a white person and that is how we end up white savior narratives. Also Jordan has had white cast members but he stated he would a white lead for his movies.

@@Mockingbird_Taloayour idea for how to make it with a BIPOC cast is sooo good! You would make an excellent screenwriter or something along those lines, if you’re not one already

It's correct

Wasps' nest is great! The best of the short stories.

Well said! Poirot is such a fascinating character. And I love Wasp's Nest, it's such an incredibly crafted story -- for being so short, it has a great impact.

Illuminating observations. Thank you.

Weird. I have never once though of Marple as a quaint proper spjnster. To me she was always the detective version of Hyacinth Bucket. A lot more intelligent, but just as much of a busybody.

@@darkwitnesslxx Well of course I agree with you, minus Hyacinth's epic social pretensions. How often have you heard Marple described as such though? I don't doubt that it may be more remarked upon in the UK but in the US she's been seen through the twee filter that has affected most popular perceptions of Britain.

@@walterreeves3679 I am a big Agatha Christie fan and have read all her books and short stories. From the beginning understood her to be a busybody. And I live in the U. S.

@@llandrin9205 I presume you mean you were born and raised in the US? In any case, saying something is the popular view isn't the same as saying it is the universal view. Every generalization has its exceptions, and mine is no exception.

My version is Ten Little Indians and includes the phrase “[n-word] in the woodpile” but iirc that’s the only instance and it’s used generally to say “something’s not right with this situation, there’s a bad actor behind it” and not directed at any one character

I think you are supposed to see it as people giving themselves away with casual racism, even before things get really ugly.

You actually read it!!! I'm so pleased. Sending you a virtual gold star... :)

I have read “10 little Indians” as a child and still read it every year. I never understood how much race was important in this one. Shame they changed the titles and some words.

Some consider it Christie's magnum opus. I read it over two days while sick and without the energy to do anything but sit in the bath with a book. It's a good read, for sure, and I would recommend it. But I've always been a little ambivalent about the ending and I wouldn't say it was quite as enjoyable as some of the Poirot books are, mostly because it doesn't feature Poirot.

What is wrong with "Ten Little Indians"?

@@johnnotrealname8168 Ten Little Indians is not its original name.

Me too. I think there may be at least three different versions. Not sure if it's just the title, or if it's edited throughout. After watching that fascinating analysis, I want to read all versions now too.

@@johnnotrealname8168 I think they meant the n-word

Cancel culture is destroying everything.

See for example, Dead Man’s Folly.

Easily the best Christie book!

Yeah. It's dark, but honestly one of her greatest.

‘Modern’ version???? It’s not even 100 years old!!!! I personally much prefer The ABC Murders. Of course with the way critics fawn over ‘dark’ themes critics would like this book best. BTW all the mysteries are solved by the end, we know what the reasons everybody was chosen & who the mastermind was. I do agree that this is a masterpiece tho

@@teleriferchnyfain Modern version probably as in with the racially sanitized version as explained in the video.

@@evaweiss1160 Yeah :(

That's what I like to hear :)

One of my favorites of all time. Hope you enjoyed it.

Interesting comment re: Wargrave - it sounds as though it's the capacity for guilt, more than the actual crime, that is being punished.

So many excellent points, Kit, especially with regards to Christie's casual anti-Semetism (that also disturbed me on rereading) and the BBC version's nods to fascism. Modern American and British media often use fascist imagery or rhetoric in historical works as a shorthand to communicate that something/someone is evil without particularly understanding what fascism actually is or how it works in the narrative (see my video "Vulcans vs Nazis" -- shameless plug!) I particularly like your second point about ATTWN being a profoundly colonial book that criticizes people who "misuse" their power rather than the power systems themselves. I agree 100% -- I wish I had articulated it in my essay! Christie is definitely NOT critiquing colonialism as a system; rather she's implying that these are "bad" colonists whose whiteness has not stopped them from behaving like "savages", which is certainly a racist attitude, but also such an explicit thesis about the intersection of race and morality that I get all the more annoyed about editions that write race out of the novel. As I say in the video, take the race themes out, and you end up with a totally different story.

@@isthisjustfantasy7583 I do not understand why people are critical of so called "Anti-Semitism" in books or media so what?

This comment was weird too.

@@johnnotrealname8168 Because anti-Semitism is bad. Try to keep up

Charles Chaplin referred to his Gypsy (Romani) descent as the skeleton in his family closet.

It just means hidden, not wanting to be found. Surely

@@ellie698 it was absolutely used to refer to the ancestry of the person being referred to, in the most racist way possible.

I was looking to see if anyone said this before I commented it myself. I wouldn't say that anyone else "scrapped" the original ending, since Christie herself is the one who changed it when she adapted it into a play.

I think the problem is that soldiers are expected to kill, whereas people like the doctor, the teacher, the charity worker, are not supposed to kill, it doesn't fit. It is also the out that the characters initially give the soldiers, that they often have to make difficult decisions and leave some people to die. I agree though, it does have an explicitly 'Onward Christian Soldiers' vibe, the 19th century values of purity and public service unravelling.

The word should be considered a metaphor. Everyone to some degree has to "fight" to survive the "battle of life".

just like every human being

In the novels Poirot often plays up his foreignness to mess with people. He takes advantage of prejudices in English society to seem less threatening or to poke fun at people and their hypocrisy. It’s actually very interesting. There are a lot of problematic things in the novels, and you don’t always know if they are there deliberately to point out how absurd they are. For example in “Death in the Clouds” the jury at the inquest of the dead woman try to deliver a verdict saying that Poirot is in fact the murderer. The judge refuses to accept the verdict and sends them back so it’s never 100% confirmed, but Poirot crackes a joke about it himself so it is likely. It immediately makes it seem so silly and ridiculous to ever suspect him just because he’s foreign, but it wouldn’t have been uncommon for that to happen at the time. She also does dabble in psychology and sometimes gets things right and other times pretty wrong. It’s pretty interesting actually.

Note that David Suchet is reading the excerpts from the book.

@@rckoala8838 Where? I know that David Suchet reads some of the audiobooks, but not this one. This one is read by Hugh Fraser and there are other recordings too, but not with David Suchet.

@@user-qj9en1kp1m I stand corrected. Perhaps it was wishful thinking!

"who writes nursery rhymes about the plague, the Spanish Flu...???" - you do know that Ring-a-ring-a-rosie is about the Black Death don't you? And that Humpty Dumpty was about the death of Richard III at the battle of Bosworth Field? Ring-a-ring-a-rosie - for the red rings on peoples skin as a symptom of The Black Death A pocket full of posies - people would carry flowers in their pockets to cover up the smell of death A-tishoo, A-tishoo - sneezing was also a symptom of The Black Death We all fall down - (dead)

Agreed - it's also the only one with the lethal ending, a great adaptation of the confession letter

Yeah, I will always stand by the BBC adaptation, it was just as perfect as you could get it honestly. The changes I thought were very well done.

I agree. I acknowledge that the absence of racial undertones changes the feel of the story, but I will also say that it's closer to what happens to the book. If anything, the other adaptations that add happy endings take a lot more away from the story. No one was “innocent” and that was the entire point.

@@z2yn No it’s not. The Russian version uses the original ending and there was an obscure Iranian television miniseries that did the same thing.

@@icoleman150 Absolutely agree. In fact that's the reason why i strongly dislike the 1945 version, it misses the point completely and turns the whole thing into a standard and unremarkable story.

Thanks for the support! That's a great idea, if I decide to get back to making video essays I will certainly reach out to you. I think I'll take a little break first and see how it goes... knowing me I may not be able to resist writing essays for long :)

true that. I recently reread the book (I first read the book as a twelve years old and I have a hard cover with the Indian Island) picked up on the points she brought up. As much as I love the play (a sucker for happy endings) , I love the book more because it shows the break down of class and race barriers. By white washing the figurines to make it tamed, it loses the point. I also noticed a gothic / slasher vibes from the book.

To change past literature is to pretend it didnt exist

I have in my small library an ex of the novel under the original name ! (that I can't write here or YT would delete this). I will keep it, not being any kind of racist.

@@eoinchaney7775 okay but we know the word, we know it's wrong, let's not pretend it doesn't exist but let's not encourage people to say words that are degrading to people. It's not that hard, just don't freaking say it. If we teach that it's a morally wrong word to say, we can still get the meaning of why that word was used in contrast to 10 white European people, because it's purpose was to be ironic. I think saying it is racist, because it absolutely is to say it now it's not just being woke it's that we should be advanced enough as a society not to call people degrading names given that those people whom the degrading was directed towards are still suffering to this day and it's not something we should proudly be saying period. I don't think we should erase the history of these words, like the "n word" because we need to learn from it's history, but it's human decency for people who are white to just not say it. It's not that hard people This is coming from someone who in high school read Huck Finn, Their Eyes Were Watching God, & To Kill A Mockingbird. When we read it in class, we just didn't say it, just like any other inappropriate words like "bitches" "fuck" etc.

@@twinny_mi While I agree we shouldn’t normalize saying these words, I think we should still show how we used words to hurt and degrade people in the past. I mean if we should learn about the physical abuse people in the past suffered, then we should know the verbal and psychological abuse too.

Thank you for leaving such a beautiful comment, Amanda. You're right to observe that a lot of love goes into my work... I try only to write about what feels actually meaningful and important to me, in the hopes of communicating to kindred spirits like yourself! Your message means a lot to me. Take care

There's......... an adaptation on the Wii???? That's a sentence I never thought I'd read

I think Christie does agree with Emily Brent, essentially. However, she grew up and was writing in a time when it was perfectly normal and entertaining to say things like the passage you've quoted. "The Hollow" is one of my favourite Christie novels but it has grotesque anti-Semitism in it that doesn't matter a bit to the plot (it's entirely incidental in chatter about minor characters). I don't think Christie would have regarded it as anything exceptional. It does make for an uncomfortable reading experience sometimes!

@@HD-ol1mc You know, now I think about it, I think maybe Christie does rank Lombard’s crime along with Vera’s the way Wargrave does- but in a way that is, in itself, racist and colonialist. Vera and Lombard are left for last. What do their crimes have in common? They both killed people who in some way, from a colonialist perspective, needed their ‘protection’. Vera killed a child who she had a responsibility to care for. The racist, colonialist view of the time treated Black people as lesser, child-like and in need of guidance from white people, who therefore had a responsibility to ‘care for’ them, just as Vera had a responsibility to care for Cyril. Lombard has that line about his actions not being those of a ‘pukka sahib’. The actions of a ‘pukka sahib’ would be to, in the colonialist view, care for those ‘lesser people’ under his control. It’s also interesting that it is Vera who (I think twice at least) dismisses or downplays Lombard’s crime, because ‘they were only natives’. Maybe this is meant to suggest that on some level she feels his crime is comparable to hers.

​​​@@HD-ol1mcNo, she would absolutely not have agreed with Miss Brent. That's why Miss Brent is among the 'victims' of ATTWN. AC absolutely hated bigotry. She once said that religion for her was an incentive to be a better person herself, but that she disliked persons for whom religion was a possibility to condemn other people.

Hey there! Thank you so much for this lovely comment. I know it was posted weeks ago, but I did get around to making a list of my favorite books and I wanted to share them with you. Here's the link on my Tumblr: plain-flavoured-english.tumblr.com/post/622829088579747840/one-of-my-subscribers-asked-me-for-some-book

I'm so glad you enjoyed ATTWN, btw. I've put another Agatha Christie on the list :)

@@isthisjustfantasy7583 Thanks so much for this. Right now I'm reading 451 Fahrenheit, so after I finish that I will buy The Secret Garden cause it looks interesting to me. Much love from NYC!

@@youlostthegame5313 I'm not crying, I just have a rose garden in my eye 😭😭😭

Vera was not an authority figure for society, but her role (governess as I recall) was _certainly_ an authority figure for the children. Which is highly relevant, IMO.

I wanted to ask you a question. Is there a platform you are still receiving messages on?