[It is no use trying to compare Mrs. Christie] with other writers of detection. She stands hors concours, in a class of her own. No one else in the world would have attempted seriously to manipulate a plot like that of Ten Little Niggers without a hopeless presentiment of failure…. Mrs. Christie disdains contraptions. She faces her readers with her bare hands and her sleeves rolled up; and she sells them ten dummies beautifully, one after the other, with the exquisite timing of a Rugby International three-quarter going through a pack of clumsy yokels to score a try under the posts…. There are ten people cooped up on Nigger Island who put on a gramophone record and hear their death-sentence. After sentence has been executed Scotland Yard asks "Who did it?" But only Mrs. Christie survives to tell. Apart from one little dubious proceeding there is no cheating; the reader is just bamboozled in a straightforward way from first to last. To show her utter superiority over our deductive faculty, from time to time Mrs. Christie even allows us to know what every character present is thinking—and still we can't guess! If it were not for that iota of hanky-panky Ten Little Niggers would be the most colossal achievement of a colossal career. As it is the book must rank with Mrs. Christie's previous best, alongside Roger Ackroyd, Lord Edgware, Styles, The Man in the Brown Suit, and Death on the Nile, on the top notch of detection. (pp. 726, 728)
Ralph Partridge, in The New Statesman & Nation (© 1939 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), November 18, 1939.
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