"Agatha Christie was primarily there to entertain and she wouldn't have liked the idea of anyone being hurt by one of her turns of phrase," said her great-grandson, James Prichard. This is how, reveals the British daily newspaper The Telegraph, that the novels of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, published between 1920 and 1976, reread by sensitive readers, henceforth employed in publishing to track down any sentence, any term risking to offend the sensibilities of those concerned, are redacted in the new edition of HarperCollins, so that nothing can risk offending Jews, Gypsies, Indians or Blacks...
This is not the first time that the work of the British novelist has been affected. Recall that in 2020 the novel Ten Little Negroes had been renamed They were ten. Knowing, however, that the title had been changed in 1940 for the American edition: And Then There Were None.
Here, the modifications go further: this time it is about rewriting, explain our British colleagues, who give some examples. In Death on the Nile, "they come back and stare and stare and their eyes are just disgusting, and so are their noses." And I don't think I really like children,” Miss Allerton reads of Egyptian children hovering around her. Agatha Christie's character will now just say, "They come back and stare and stare." And I don't think I really like children. »
Hunting was done for terms deemed offensive such as: oriental, or Nubian, or "gypsy type", or even "indigenous" which becomes "local". Do Indians have a special temperament? In Miss Marple bows out, the Indian judge, asking for her breakfast with "his Indian temper", only asks for it with "his temper". As for the Indian waiter in The Major Talked Too Much, he will no longer be described as "smiling with such beautiful white teeth".
Another example concerns the admittedly anti-Semitic musings of Hercule Poirot in La Mystérieuse Affaire de Styles, as well as a character he describes as "Jewish, of course". In the same novel, the description of a character presented as "gypsy type" is also missing.
