Why are so many Agatha Christie novels published with multiple titles?

Question

For example: And Then There Were None was first called Ten Little Indians;

The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side was later shortened to The Mirror Crack'd;

Death in the Air is also known as Death in the Clouds;

What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw is also known as 4:50 from Paddington.

Why are there so many alternate title for Christie's novels?

Answer 1

This is because Christie was published in both the United States and the United Kingdom. These are the two largest markets for English-language books, and in the mid-20th century when Christie was writing, most publishers operated in one of these markets and not the other. So the variant titles of Christie’s works are due to the choices made by different publishers in the two markets.

Amalgamation in the publishing industry has since resulted in a few large companies that publish on both sides of the Atlantic, so variant titles are now much rarer.

For nearly all her career, Christie published with Collins in the UK and Dodd, Mead and Company in the US, and many of her books have titles that vary between the two publishers:

Year	US title (Dodd, Mead & Company)	UK title (Collins Crime Club)
1931	Murder at Hazelmoor	The Sittaford Mystery
1933	The Tuesday Club Murders	The Thirteen Problems
1933	Thirteen at Dinner	Lord Edgware Dies
1934	Murder in the Calais Coach	Murder on the Orient Express
1934	The Boomerang Clue	Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
1934	Mr. Parker Pyne, Detective	Parker Pyne Investigates
1934	Murder in Three Acts	Three Act Tragedy
1935	Death in the Air	Death in the Clouds
1937	Dead Man’s Mirror	Murder in the Mews
1937	Poirot Loses a Client	Dumb Witness
1938	Murder for Christmas	Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
1939	Easy to Kill	Murder is Easy
1939	And Then There Were None	Ten Little N—
1941	The Patriotic Murders	One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
1942	Murder in Retrospect	Five Little Pigs
1945	Remembered Death	Sparkling Cyanide
1948	There is a Tide …	Taken at the Flood
1952	Murder with Mirrors	They Do It with Mirrors
1953	Funerals are Fatal	After the Funeral
1955	So Many Steps to Death	Destination Unknown
1955	Hickory Dickory Death	Hickory Dickory Dock
1957	What Mrs McGillicuddy Saw!	4.50 from Paddington
1962	The Mirror Crack’d	The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side

In a few cases paperback editions had further variants. Note that in this period hardback and paperback editions were handled by different firms.

Original (US) title	Year	Publisher	Title
Murder for Christmas	1947	Avon Books	A Holiday for Murder
Mrs. McGinty’s Dead	1952	Detective Book Club	Blood Will Tell
The Patriotic Murders	1953	Dell Books	An Overdose of Death
The Hollow	1954	Dell Books	Murder after Hours
After the Funeral	1963	Fontana Books	Murder at the Gallop
And Then There Were None	1964	Pocket Books	Ten Little Indians

So why do publishers do this? Well, the title of a book is part of its marketing, like its cover picture and blurb, and so different markets may benefit from different titles. Some of the reasons for this variation are guessable:

• In the case of And Then There Were None, the racial epithet in the original UK title was unacceptable in the US.
• In the cases of Murder in the Mews and 4.50 from Paddington, the US publisher was probably concerned that potential readers might not know what a “Mews” was, nor that “Paddington” is a railway station.
• In the cases of One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, Five Little Pigs and Hickory Dickory Dock, the US publisher was probably concerned that potential readers might mistake these for childrens’ books due to the quotation from a nursery rhyme in the title.
• In the case of Murder at the Gallop the publisher wanted to take advantage of a tie-in with the film starring Margaret Rutherford.

However, most of the reasons seem to be lost to history. I did look in Christie’s An Autobiography and some more recent biographies and found nothing relevant to this question.

It should be emphasized that there is nothing particularly unusual about Christie in this respect: many other works of popular fiction have titles that vary trans-Atlantically. For example, if we look at Christie’s contemporary John Dickson Carr, we find:

Year	US title (Harper)	UK title (Hamish Hamilton)
1935	The Three Coffins	The Hollow Man
1936	The Magic Lantern Murders	The Punch and Judy Murders
1937	The Peacock Feather Murders	The Ten Teacups
1938	The Crossbow Murder	The Judas Window
1939	Fatal Descent	Drop to His Death
1939	The Problem of the Green Capsule	The Black Spectacles
1940	Nine—And Death Makes Ten	Murder in the Submarine Zone
1941	Death Turns the Tables	The Seat of the Scornful
1941	Cross of Murder	Seeing is Believing
1942	Death and the Gilded Man	The Gilded Man
1945	Lord of the Sorcerers	The Curse of the Bronze Lamp

Carr’s biographer Douglas Greene noted a few cases where Harper asked for a change of title to better convey the nature of the work to the American public:

Carr’s original title for The Problem of the Green Capsule was The Black Spectacles, based on the spectacles that the murderer wore while committing the crime. One of the themes of the story, moreover, is that “all witnesses, metaphorically, wear black spectacles.” Harpers, however, objected that the title was not particularly intriguing for a novel of crime and mystery. Carr then suggested The Problem of the Green Capsule, and Harpers agreed.† […]

Harpers did not get the point of Carr’s title, The Seat of the Scornful, which did not seem to them right for a detective novel, and before even seeing Carr’s typescript asked for an alternate. Carr apparently did not send an acceptable suggestion, for Harpers devised the American title, Death Turns the Tables, which does describe a part of the book but misses Carr's theme.‡

_{Douglas G. Greene (1995). John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles, chapters 7 & 11. Cincinatti: Crippen & Landru.}

_{† But in a footnote Greene added, “The letters are so vague, however, that they might be read to indicate that Carr came up with a list of titles—Harpers picked one, Hamilton another.” ‡ Carr’s title quotes from Psalm 1:1 “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the path of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful.”}