Agatha Christie’s novels are being rewritten by her publisher, HarperCollins, to suit “modern sensibilities,” the Sunday Telegraph revealed on Sunday.
The mysteries of Inspector Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple thus join the wave of reissues to make them more acceptable to new readers who have also caught up with Roald Dahl’s books or the James Bond adventures written by Ian Fleming.
Entire passages of the works of the “queen of crime” have been deleted or rewritten in the new editions of those books that are being prepared or that have been published since 2020, the Sunday newspaper notes.
A commission of “sensitive readers” reviewed Christie’s works to ensure that “ethnic insults or references” have been removed, as well as physical descriptions of some of the characters.
The newspaper cites the example of several comments about the teeth and physique of people in the books that have been removed, especially in cases where the protagonists of the novels meet people outside the UK.
Marple’s and Poirot’s internal monologues have been cut and references to a character’s revulsion for children have been modified.
Vocabulary has also been altered to remove the term “Oriental,” while the racial allusion to a black servant has been removed, among other examples cited by the newspaper.
The company Agatha Christie Limited, run by the author’s great-grandson James Prichard, manages the rights to her works for literature and film.
