Agatha Christie's classics are being revised to eliminate offensive language.
Racist and xenophobic terms were found in the works; publishers are seeking to adapt their collections to current times and promote inclusion.
247 The novels of renowned author Agatha Christie, known as the "Queen of Crime," are undergoing a revision to remove racist references and other language offensive to modern audiences, following a trend of updating classic works. This information was reported by the British newspaper The Telegraph.
According to the British newspaper The Telegraph, publisher HarperCollins has made changes to some passages and completely eliminated others in its new digital editions of mysteries featuring detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, characters created by the author in many of her books.
“The amendments to the books, published between 1920 and 1976, the year of Christie's death, include changes to the narrator's interior monologue. For example, Poirot's description of another character as 'a Jew, of course' in Christie's debut novel, 'The Mysterious Affair at Styles' (1920), has been removed from the new version,” it highlights. reporter from CNN.
Other terms that were removed, according to the publication, were:
- Throughout the revised version of the short story collection "The Final Cases of Miss Marple and Two Other Stories," the word "native" has been replaced with "local," reports The Telegraph.
- A passage describing a servant as "black" and "smiling" has been revised, and the character is now simply referred to as "the one who waves," without reference to his race;
- In the 1937 novel "Death on the Nile," references to the "Nubian people" were removed.