For most of Sam’s childhood he had spent summers at his grandmother’s house in North Yorkshire. Patricia Barnard was his mother’s mother, who had spent part of her adult life in Jamaica, arriving there from England in 1946 to take a post as a secretary at an export company. She’d fallen in love with Robert Hamilton, owner of a popular Kingston restaurant, and a Black Jamaican. She was married and pregnant within the year, giving birth to Rosemary, Sam’s mother. Sam had asked his grandmother several times about what it had been like to be in an interracial marriage in the 1940s and 1950s. She’d always said that the worst of it was other people’s bad manners—“just a funny look now and then, when we took the bus together.”
Bob Hamilton, her husband, had died when their only daughter was just eighteen, and Patricia had moved back to England, settling into a family cottage in the Yorkshire Dales. And that stone cottage was where Sam had spent the best months of his childhood, given freedom to wander through the English countryside, and, more important, access to his grandmother’s book collection. At the age of ten he’d read Agatha Christie’s Sleeping Murder and fallen in love with it. After that, he was hooked on the genre. And he became a true Anglophile, obsessed with Cadbury chocolate, Arsenal football, and even the silly English sitcoms his grandmother and he watched on her bulky television set in the sitting room. But it was the books that stuck with him most of all. He loved Agatha Christie and Dick Francis and Ruth Rendell, all his grandmother’s favorites, and those books provided for him a worldview, one so different from that of his life growing up in Houma, his parents angry all the time and eventually divorcing during his senior year of high school.
Sam’s friends and colleagues had been mostly surprised when he’d applied for the job in Kennewick, Maine, making jokes about how he was going to double the number of Jamaicans living in New England. But Jean Landry, the chief of police, during Sam’s goodbye party, was the one who actually figured out Sam’s real motivation. During her brief speech, she’d said, “I always knew that Sam, down deep, really wants to be Jessica Fletcher from Cabot Cove, Maine, and now he’ll get his chance.” And it was partly true. Although he returned to visit England often, even after his grandmother’s death, he knew he couldn’t work there. But he could work in New England, start a new life in a Maine village, and at least feel as though he was living the life he was born to live.
Staring at his grandmother’s Agatha Christie books, arranged chronologically, he pulled out his hardcover edition of the book that would eventually come to be known as And Then There Were None, or Ten Little Indians. But the version that Sam Hamilton owned, in hardcover, bore the original title: Ten Little Niggers.
Sam remembered that after he’d finished Sleeping Murder he’d asked Nana Pat what he should read next.
“There’s a book I think you’d really like,” she said, “but I think I should buy a new copy for you.”
“You don’t have it?”
“I do, but it has a not-so-nice title. In fact, it was so not nice that they changed it. They’ve changed it a couple of times, actually.”
She’d shown him the book and explained that it came from a nursery rhyme that had been popular many years ago. Sam had been fascinated, especially by the cover—a white, ghostly hand plucking at ten little African figures, some standing, some brandishing spears, some lying down. He’d read the book, of course, in one terrifying afternoon, not wanting to wait for Nana Pat to order a more appropriately titled version from the village bookstore.
Afterward, he’d followed her around the house while she’d tidied up, wanting to talk about what had happened in the novel, the scariest murders, the phonograph recording in which all of the victims had been accused of their crimes, how long the bodies were on the island after everyone was dead.
“Don’t you want to know about the title?” she’d asked.
“I thought that it meant that everyone who got invited to the island was Black, but I don’t think they were.”
“No, they were all white. But don’t go telling your parents that I let you read a book with that word in the title. Tell them it was called And Then There Were None.”
“Dad uses that word all the time.”
“What word?”
“Nigger.”
“Does he?”
“Not all the time, but some of the time.”
“It’s okay for him, I guess, but it wasn’t okay for Agatha Christie. Maybe it was at the time, but not now.”