Dear My Copy of Ten Little Indians,
Now you would be called And Then There Were None, which is far better of course, but in 1987 you were still Ten Little Indians.
I bought you at a book fair at my elementary school. What a wonderful event that was. Tables in the hallway piled with books so when you walked to the restroom you were walking in a book store. When you walked to the cafeteria: book store. I remember the doors propped open after school and the sunlight falling in rectangles onto the tables and the PTA mothers who were cashiering. Hands and arms exchanging books for money darted in and out of the light.
Do you remember how much you cost, My Copy? I don’t. I also don’t remember what else I bought that day. But I remember that you opened a world for me. Murder on the page! Evil caged by lines of text! A safe place in which to descend into chaos and evil and then – just in time – to watch it all get set right again. Oh and that ending! You knew all the time and didn’t give it away. You sly thing.
Thank you for setting me on my mystery journey, My Copy. You will always have a special place in my heart. (Though not my bookshelf because you, sadly, didn’t make it with me this far.) Maybe you are pulped now because of your racist title. Maybe your paper lives on in another book, on another shelf somewhere. If so, I hope a trace of my happiness from the time we spent together is imprinted somewhere in your aura. Maybe it beckons to other young readers – “Come, begin something here, with me.”
With so much gratitude,
-e.