Actually, original title by Agatha Christie was "Ten Little Niggers" [1]. I didn't read the book, but I really liked the movie [2] (there is eng subs). People in reviews say it's closest and probably best adaptation. IMO, it's excellent.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoTDsuSgPBw

Oh yeah, that one too. I didn't put it on my list because, ironically, I never read it. I saw the play when I was a kid so I never bothered to read the book.

> "And Then There Were None"

This is a fascinating book indeed.

It was released in the US as And Then There Were None because the original UK title was, shall we say, significantly more offensive to a US audience than Ten Little Indians would have been. It's not exactly a case of "political correctness." Later, it went through various renaming iterations in the UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None

Also the best selling, proving that the mass market sometimes gets art right. It's Agatha at her most brilliant, ruthless not only in story but in style. The English is as hard and bare as possible. IIRC it's almost all dialog and minimal dialog at that. But you don't notice because the story is such a drug.

It stands apart from her other books by having no familiar characters and being completely sealed. A perfect idea, perfectly executed. I wonder if Nabokov ever read it.

>Haven't seen the new movie. Guessing it is ok, but different. At best.

I assume you mean Murder on the Orient Express? IMO, it was "OK." Perfectly serviceable and, had there not been an earlier film version, I'd have said it was perfectly fine if nothing outstanding. But I found basically nothing that I thought was better than the 70s version and a number of things that weren't as good. If I were to watch one, I'd watch the older version even today.

I watched the Branagh film on a recent flight.

It's... OK, I guess. I'd recommend anyone who wants to see it read the book first. The twist is preserved, but in the film doesn't work quite as well.

The basic problem (for those who are curious) is that the book takes you there through a couple iterations of Poirot interviewing the passengers, and showing exactly how he teases out each little piece of information that finally causes the truth to pop out at the end. The film, constrained by running-time concerns, can't do that, so several things that are separate and gradual revelations in the book are part of one big reveal.

A lot of the fun of the book (for me, at least) is the series of small shocks as he goes through the initial set of interviews and comes away with nothing, then figures out the pieces of the puzzle, confronts other people with them in later interviews, and explains how he worked them out from previous clues. That gives the eventual solution of the murder an entirely different feel.

There's also the usual amount of gratuitous deviation from the source in adding a bit of action and fiddling with characters, which also detracts a bit. The worst of it is that the moment when Poirot's solution is finally confirmed -- which is done in the book with a wonderful single sentence uttered by one passenger -- was changed entirely and became much more cruel than the book, in a way that deviates from how Christie usually presents Poirot's character.