The company and HarperCollins have been contacted for comment. Though this is not the first time the content of Christie’s novels has been changed, her 1939 novel And Then There Were None was previously published under a different title that included a racist term, which was last published under that name in 1977, and included this word repeatedly in the story.Īgatha Christie Limited, a company run by the author’s great-grandson James Prichard, is understood to handle licensing for her literary and film rights. They vet both new publications and older works for potentially offensive language and descriptions, and aim to improve diversity in the publishing industry – though some are paid extremely low wages. Sensitivity readers are a comparatively recent phenomenon in publishing that have gained widespread attention in the past two years. In the new edition of the 1964 Miss Marple novel A Caribbean Mystery, the amateur detective’s musing that a hotel worker smiling at her has “such lovely white teeth” has been removed, the newspaper added. 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. The word “natives” has also been replaced with the word “local”.Īmong 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”. The newspaper reported that the edits cut references to ethnicity, such as describing a character as black, Jewish or Gypsy, or a female character’s torso as “of black marble” and a judge’s “Indian temper”, and removed terms such as “Oriental” and the N-word. 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. Sensitivity readers had made the edits, which were evident in digital versions of the new editions, including the entire Miss Marple run and selected Poirot novels set to be released or that have been released since 2020, the Telegraph reported.

Death on the nile agatha christie book