(Headline USA) Agatha Christie’s mystery novels are the latest target of woke sensitivity readers, according to reports.
Two of Christie’s famous fictional detectives—“Poirot” and “Miss Marple”—have been scrubbed of controversial language and descriptions deemed offensive by publisher HarperCollins, accordion to the Telegraph.
An example of the reported revisions includes erasing references to people smiling, which include negative descriptions of their teeth. The sensitivity readers have also flagged Christie’s references to ethnicity, such as “Oriental.”
Dialogue by “unsympathetic characters” has also been cut out. This includes quotes from Christie’s character Mrs. Allerton, who at one point says of a group of annoying children, “Their eyes are simply disgusting, and so are their noses.”
The edited version now reads The edited version reads: “They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children.”
In Death on the Nile, the “Nubian boatman” will now be referred to as only the “boatman.”
One description of a West Indian hotel worker in A Caribbean Mystery as having “such lovely white teeth” has been cut out, as has a reference to a female character having “a torso of black marble such as a sculptor would have enjoyed.”
In Miss Marple’s Final Cases and Two Other Stories, the phrase “natives” has been replaced with the word “local.”
Several other classic authors—including Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming and R.L. Stine—have had their works hijacked and changed by woke sensitivity readers in recent months.
Dahl’s novels have been similarly stripped of “offensive” language. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for example, a description of Augustus Gloop as “enormously fat” was changed to “enormous.” Aunt Sponge from James and the Giant Peach, originally described as “enormously fat,” is now “quite large” and is no longer is described as “fat” at all.
