[Image: poster for 1945’s And Then There Were None, starring Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, et al…. including someone named Queenie Leonard — who (one suspects) may have been among the first to go.]
Over at Soho Press, Senior Editor (and crime-fiction specialist) Juliet Grames has been hosting a series of blog posts she’s dubbed the “Crime Read-Along” series. Each month, she leads a discussion of a different classic crime story — private-detective story, police procedural, “cozy,” or what-have-you — selected from stories that she doesn’t know as well as ones she does. Each discussion begins with an introductory post on some more general topic related to the title under discussion, followed shortly by a post about the book itself. You can see all the books covered so far, with links to both parts, on the series’ Calendar page. On the shelf already: Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (Part 1: “Why is early crime fiction so French?”); Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet” (Part 1: “What does Sherlock Holmes mean to you?”); Josephine Tey’s The Man in the Queue (Part 1: the “Grande Dames” of the Golden Age of British detective fiction, including Tey); and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (Part 1: “the origins of American noir“).
Under consideration in July: one of Agatha Christie’s biggest-selling, most popular books, And Then There Were None.
What’s that you say? You don’t recognize the title? Hardly your fault: it’s just one of several versions. On publication in England in 1939, it went by Catch a Nigger by the Toe; roughly concurrently with its release there, the Saturday Evening Post serialized it as Ten Little Indians… and within a few months had been re-published in England under the And Then There Were None moniker. (Wikipedia tells the story. My first exposure to it was the 1965 film version, which used the Indians version.)
Just why it might have gone through all these re-christenings doesn’t surprise, of course. It doesn’t require knee-jerk political correctness to recognize that some words just whup us upside the head with an almost visceral shock value. In fact, although there may be some appeal to “getting people talking” (No such thing as bad publicity, goes the press agent mantra), any author — or editor, or publisher — really needs to think hard before committing such a title to print. Do you seriously believe you’ll attract more readers via controversy than you’ll turn off via distaste?
Which (as Grames mentions in her Part 1 post for July) raises the question of what Agatha Christie (and her various representatives) might have been thinking in the late 1930s.
To my mind, arguing that, well, the 1930s were a different time… and well, England didn’t have the United States’ history of slavery… — those are just excuses. The times weren’t that different. And it wasn’t as though the publisher — and Christie — never intended it for the US audience.
Part of me wants to say, like, who the hell cares? What a writer or any other artist chooses to call his or her work is his or her own business, and any “controversy” comes about only because someone else, after the fact, stirred it up.
And part of me knows well how powerfully — and literally — words set the tone for a culture. It’s one thing for Mark Twain to put the word nigger in the mouth of a poorly educated boy of the 19th-century American south; critics and do-gooders who tamper with such choices, however well-meaning, really haven’t thought very hard about the matter. But the responsibility for the effect of a work’s words does not lie entirely with the audience, either.
Especially in a title. I mean, sheesh. It’s like slapping a reader in the face and saying, Yeah, I know, and I don’t care, and this is MY book goddammit.
Heck of a thing, if you ask me.
Addendum: The plot of Christie’s book pretty much develops in the same manner as the nursery rhyme. So at first I thought, well, what was she to do? It was the perfect accompaniment, and if that’s the way the nursery rhyme goes then it’s not up to her to re-write it…
…except, well, no: the original rhyme was the ten-little-Indians version. (Wikipedia cites the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes on this point.) While it’s true that nigger soon replaced Indian (or Injun), I’m not convinced by claims that Christie might have been just following a given. She had a choice.
Addendum 2: In a comment at Juliet Grames’s post, I mentioned a 1970s-something public-service announcement I remembered, which made use of the ten-little-Indians meme to warn young people away from drug abuse. Unsurprisingly, someone’s resurrected it on YouTube:
(My favorite part about this clip: the contrast with the second or so of the show it interrupted, The New Price Is Right, starring a madly grinning Bob Barker.)
As you can see in the comments on the video’s own page, even “Ten Little Indians” makes some people cringe. I don’t know what the dividing line is, but clearly different audiences have different thresholds. (Which doesn’t make an author’s job any easier.)
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