10 Things You Didn't Know About And Then There Were None

Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for And Then There Were None

1. Agatha Christie was compelled to write And Then There Were None because it was such a difficult plot to write effectively that the idea fascinated her. The story line went through massive rewrites before she was ready to write it.
2. Agatha Christie originally considered including at least twelve characters on the island which is two more than the ten that she finally settled on.
3. In early brain storming sessions, the crimes that some characters committed were quite different from the ones in the final book. The character who eventually became Vera Claythorne originally drove her lover to suicide, the character who became Emily Brent bullied her servant into taking poison, and the military man sent thirty soldiers to die in battle unnecessarily.
4. As Christie worked on the stage adaptation of And Then There Were None, she decided to change the ending to a 'happier' one where characters survive and fall in love, because as the play was being performed during World War II, she thought that the original ending would have been far too bleak.
5. At first, no one wanted to produce the play version of And Then There Were None because they insisted that the storyline wouldn't work on stage and that people would laugh at it. After a lot of effort, Christie was able to find a producer willing to take a chance on the show.
6. The original home of the play, the St. James's Theatre, was bombed-out during World War II. The play transferred to another venue and continued its run.
7. And Then There Were None is arguably Christie's most parodied work. Some examples include a Superman comic book that borrowed heavily from Christie's plot and the animated television series Family Guy which produced a parody titled 'And Then There Were Fewer'.
8. The movie adaptations of the story have a habit of moving the story to other settings. Though the 1945 film kept the setting of an island off the coast of England, later movies set the story on a mountaintop chalet, the Iranian desert, and on an African safari.
9. In an early live television production of And Then There Were None, one of the victims, shortly after being stabbed to 'death,' didn't realise that he was still on-camera, and he simply stood up and walked off with his hands in his pockets.
10. In 2015 And Then There Were None was voted the World's Favourite Christie in a global vote which saw fans from over 100 countries vote.

Compiled by Agatha Christie expert Chris Chan. Find out more about the 2015 TV show And Then There Were None.