Last night in the bookshop, a customer sold us a huge stack of old Agatha Christie paperbacks. Usual

Last night in the bookshop, a customer sold us a huge stack of old Agatha Christie paperbacks. Usually I just shelve them without pause (I mean, how many books did this dame write anyway?) but then I noticed there were multiple copies of Murder on the Orient Express. I’m always interested in reprints, simply because of the variations in cover art, but these turned out to be all the same. Disappointed, I started putting them all away, when I came across this:

TEN LITTLE NIGGERS.

Woah! It was so Un-PC, I hadto get it.

I can’t believe they even lynched the golliwog!

According to its Wikipedia, it was first published in London in 1939 and continued to appear under that title until the early 1980s, when it became And Then There Were None.

The funny thing is, the original title survives in many foreign-language versions of the novel: for example, the Spanish title is Diez Negritos. No big deal!