pretty maids all in a row.
This short nursery rhyme features no less than five times throughout the Notebooks, even though its words gave the title of just one short story, ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’. But it seems to have made an impression on Christie’s mind as she often referred to it in the course of plotting other titles. And there are similarities between this short story and a novel she planned but never wrote. The story was first published in the UK in The Strand, having appeared some months earlier in Ladies’ Home Journal in the USA. This story’s connection to the nursery rhyme is stronger than ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ or ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds’, as it includes the shells, the garden and the killer’s name. Mary Delafontaine poisons her aunt and hides the shells of the fatal oysters among the other cockle shells used as decoration in her garden. She tries, unsuccessfully, to incriminate the foreign companion:
The old lady—the foreign girl—Mary—the ‘weak’ husband
The final plot is encapsulated in Notebook 20:
Oyster story—Man dies after dinner—strychnine in oyster—swallowed—shells out in garden or in shell box— food analysed—nothing. Possibly some complication about a cachet he took—or someone gave him—if so, unjustly accused
It is another example of one of Christie’s favourite early plot devices—the summoning of Poirot to the scene of a suspected crime only to discover when he arrives that he is too late. As early as 1923 she first used this idea in The Murder on the Links, and subsequently in ‘The Cornish Mystery’, Dumb Witness and ‘The Incident of the Dog’s Ball’ (see the Appendix). It can be seen why—it has an emotional and a practical impact. The summoner, who has promised to explain the situation in detail, is now unable to do so and Poirot has a moral, as well as a practical, imperative to solve the crime. There is also the plot device of the victim having known ‘too much’, always a good way to start a detective story. In ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’, the appearance of a Russian character would have been very unusual in detective fiction of the day. In fact, the appearance of any foreigner (including Poirot) is always viewed with suspicion by the inhabitants of small villages throughout the Christie canon. And, of course—as can be seen in Dumb Witness—this allowed Christie to subvert, yet again, the readers’ prejudices.
The eponymous main character, Mary Delafontaine, became a byword in Christie’s shorthand, appearing in abbreviated form in the course of plotting Third Girl and Ordeal by Innocence respectively, even though she was used in the final plot of neither novel:
Mary Del.—Arthur (innocent husband)—Katrina—suspicious, passionate—for money looks after old boy
Olivia (The Mary Delafontaine wife)
The name was also used for one of the victims in The Pale Horse; she is a friend of Mrs Oliver in Chapter 1 and she appears on Father Gorman’s doomed list in the following chapter.
Ten Little Niggers 6 November 1939 Ten strangers are invited to a weekend on an island off the coast of Devon. Their host fails to appear and a series of deaths among their fellow-guests make them realise that one of them is a killer following the macabre nursery rhyme that hangs in each bedroom.
Ten little nigger boys went out to dine One choked his little self and then there were nine; Nine little nigger boys sat up very late One overslept himself and then there were eight; Eight little nigger boys travelling in Devon One said he’d stay there and then there were seven; Seven little nigger boys chopping up sticks One chopped himself in half and then there were six; Six little nigger boys playing with a hive A bumble bee stung one and then there were five; Five little nigger boys going in for law One got in Chancery and then there were four; Four little nigger boys going out to sea A red herring swallowed one and then there were three; Three little nigger boys walking in the Zoo A big bear hugged one and then there were two; Two little nigger boys sitting in the sun One got frizzled up and then there was one; One little nigger boy left all alone He went and hanged himself and then there were none.
Ten Little Niggers (also known as And Then There Were None) is Agatha Christie’s most famous novel, her greatest technical achievement and the best-selling crime novel of all time. Of all the ‘nursery rhyme’ titles this is the one that sticks closest to its origins. Although Christie adopted the ‘He got married and then there were none’ ending for the stage adaptation, she used the original ending for the climax of the novel. The existence of the rhyme is a constant theme throughout the novel, especially when the characters realise what is happening. The manner of each death cleverly echoes the rhyme, the only slightly jarring note being the death of Blore where the difficult Zoo idea is somewhat stretched.
With the writing of this book Christie set herself a challenge and in her Autobiography she describes how the difficulty of the central idea attracted her: ‘Ten people had to die without it becoming ridiculous. I wrote the book after a tremendous amount of planning…It was clear, straightforward, baffling and yet had a perfectly reasonable explanation…the person who was really pleased with it was myself, for I knew better than any critic how difficult it had been.’
As we saw in Chapter 2, this ‘tremendous planning’ is not evident from Notebook 65, the only one to feature this novel. This Notebook does, however, include interesting details of various characters that did not make it into the completed book. And, on the evidence of the Notebooks alone, it would seem to be the characters themselves that gave most trouble. At no stage are ten characters listed. At first there are eight (I have added probable names to both lists, although Vera Claythorne, Emily Brent, Philip Lombard and General MacArthur appear in the novel as listed in the Notebook, although minor background details were to change):
When Collins began to advertise Ten Little Niggers in Booksellers Record in July 1939, they called it, quite simply, ‘the greatest story Agatha Christie has ever written’. But their item in the Crime Club News incurred the wrath of the writer herself and she wrote from Greenway House on 24 July to William Collins to protest. She felt that too much of the plot was revealed, pointing out that ‘any book is ruined when you know exactly what is going to happen all the way along’. She also includes a veiled threat when she reminds him that she is just about to sign a contract for her next four books and is unwilling to do so unless they can guarantee that this error of judgement will not be repeated. Despite the fact that Collins declared it to be ‘certainly the greatest detective story that the Crime Club has ever published and probably, we believe, the world will declare it the greatest detective story ever written’, they included too many revelations. It is obvious what she means. They write about the island, the rhyme, the disappearing china figures, the realisation that the killer is among them and, most damning of all, the fact that the last one to die is not necessarily the villain. One’s sympathies are entirely with Agatha Christie; all they omitted was the name of the killer.
Ten Niggers
Doctor—drunk at op—or careless [Dr Armstrong]
Judge—unjust Summing Up [Judge Wargrave]
Man and Wife—Servants (did in old lady) [Mr and Mrs Rogers]
Girl—whose lover shot himself [Vera]
Husband and wife—Blackmailing
Allenby—Youngish man—dangerous alert [Lombard]
At a later stage, to judge from the change from pencil to pen and the slightly different handwriting, she tries again. This time she includes 12 characters:
1. Vera Claythorne—Secretary at school—has applied at agency for holiday post
2. Mr Justice Swettenham in first class carriage [Judge Wargrave]
3. Doctor—telegram from Gifford—Can you join us—etc. [Dr Armstrong]
4 5. Capt and Mrs Winyard—Letters—mutual friend Letty Harrington—Come for weekend
6. Lombard—visited by solicitor or confidential agent—offered one hundred guineas—take it or leave it
7. University student who runs over children—a bit tight—arrives in car [Anthony Marston]
8. Llewellyn Oban—Committed perjury in murder case—man executed [Blore]
9. Emily Brent—turned out maidservant—later drank oxalic acid—letter from someone starting guest house and is a friend of hers—free stay
