Modern audiences

Another cleanup on aisle 10.

Several Agatha Christie novels have been edited to remove potentially offensive language, including insults and references to ethnicity.

Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries written between 1920 and 1976 have had passages reworked or removed in new editions published by HarperCollins to strip them of language and descriptions that modern audiences find offensive, especially those involving the characters Christie’s protagonists encounter outside the UK.

To be honest this doesn’t really outrage me all that much. Agatha Christie wasn’t a giant of literature, she was a popular mystery writer.

The updates follow edits made to books by Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming to remove offensive references to gender and race in a bid to preserve their relevance to modern readers.

Or, a bid to make it possible to read their books without flinching. Dahl is far more of a literary writer than Christie or Fleming, and I do think that makes a difference. I think I can explain why, too: Christie and Fleming are telling stories; the language is just the medium. Literary writers care about the language as well as the stories.

Among the examples of changes cited by the Telegraph is the 1937 Poirot novel Death on the Nile, in which the character of Mrs Allerton complains that a group of children are pestering her, saying that “they come back and stare, and stare, and their eyes are simply disgusting, and so are their noses, and I don’t believe I really like children”.

This has been stripped down in a new edition to state: “They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children.”

But what if the racist language is there to tell us something about Mrs Allerton?

H/t Nullius in Verba

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