Agatha Christie becomes latest author revised by sensitivity readers: Report

BBest-selling author Agatha Christie’s books have reportedly become the latest target for sensitive readers who revise or remove original passages in new editions Poirot And Miss Marble Secrets published by HarperCollins.

These novels were written between 1920 and 1976, and now the revised editions are reported to be stripped of certain language and descriptions deemed offensive.

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Some examples of the reported edits include deleting references to smiling people and descriptions of their teeth and physique, as well as insults or references to ethnicity, such as “Oriental,” per the telegraph.

HarperCollins did not respond Washington examiner Please confirm and comment.

Dialogue of “dislikeable characters” was also reportedly removed.

Sensitivity readers are said to have cut down the dialogue of Christie’s 1937 character Mrs. Allerton Poirot novel Death on the Nile. In the text, she criticized a group of annoying children: “Their eyes are just disgusting, their noses too.” The new version reportedly removes that description.

“The Nubian boatswain” is just “the boatswain” in the same novel.

The 1964 Miss Marble novel A Caribbean Mystery also had a few revisions, with the new edition missing the description of a West Indian hotel worker with “such beautiful white teeth”. A reference to a female figure with “a torso of black marble such as would have pleased a sculptor” was also removed. A racial slur against people with black or brown skin was further removed from the book.

In her 1920 debut novel The mysterious affair at Styles, Poirot’s comment that another character was “of course a Jew”, was also shortened. In the same book, all references to gypsies were deleted.

As for her book Miss Marple’s Recent Cases and Two Other Storiesthe new edition changes the description of an angry character from “his Indian temper” to just “his temper”.

Reportedly, “native” was also replaced with the word “local.”

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The revisions of Christie’s original work in new editions come as the book publishing industry, in the name of inclusion, has increasingly made revisions to classic works to try to accommodate modern sensibilities.

Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, and RL Stine were among the few authors whose works were revised by book publishers.