One of Agatha Christie's nost celebrated crime novels first published in the United Kingdom by the Collins Crime Club on 6 November 1939, as Ten Little Niggers, after the children's counting rhyme and minstrel song, which serves as a major plot element. The book is the world's best-selling mystery, and with over 100 million copies sold is one of the best-selling books of all time. The novel has been listed as the sixth best-selling title (any language, including reference works). The plot is structured around the ten lines of the children's counting rhyme. Each of the ten victims – eight guests plus the island's two caretakers – is killed in a manner which reflects one of the lines of the rhyme. The recent owner of the island is also killed, but on the mainland and before the story begins. Both of the original US publications changed the title from that originally used in the UK to "And Then There Were None", due to the offensiveness of the word in American culture, where it was more widely perceived as a racially loaded ethnic slur or insult compared to the contemporaneous culture in the United Kingdom.