Ten little Niggers, in American reprints and adaptations were all retitled "And Then There Were None", after the last five words in the nursery rhyme that has a roud folk song index number of what?
And Then There Were None And Then There Were None is a mystery novel by English writer Agatha Christie, widely considered her masterpiece and described by her as the most difficult of her books to write. It was first published in the United Kingdom by the Collins Crime Club on 6 November 1939, as Ten Little Niggers, after the British blackface song, which serves as a major plot point. The US edition was not released until December 1939; its American reprints and adaptations were all retitled "And Then There Were None", after the last five words in the nursery rhyme "Ten Little Indians".
Tom Potts Tom Potts is #109 of the Child Ballads, the collection of 305 ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, collected by Francis James Child in the late nineteenth century. The collection was published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads between 1882 and 1898 by Houghton Mifflin in ten volumes and later reissued in a five volume edition.