Agatha Christie and the yellow of corrected books: via insults or ethnic references

A few weeks after the controversy over the linguistic revisions and corrections in the books of Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming in the name of political correctness, a new one opens in the United Kingdom concerning the novels of the queen of yellow, Agatha Christie. As emerges from the UK press, some of her famous works have in fact been partially corrected by the publisher HarperCollins to take into account contemporary sensibilities, thus eliminating terms nowadays considered offensive and racist.

This revision started in 2020 and is leading to the publication of new «cleaned» editions of the stories with the most famous characters of the writer, such as Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple: in addition to the corrected words, some passages have been rewritten and in some cases completely removed arousing criticism on social media of those who speak of «cancel culture» once again in action with censorship.

Away therefore terms normally used at Christie’s time to classify people of different ethnicity from the British white one and who were affected in some cases by a colonialist mentality and racist prejudices. Words such as “black”, “Jew”, “gypsy” disappear, but also “Oriental” and “Indian temperament” to characterize a character while the “natives” become the “locals”. In the meantime, she is mounting controversy on Twitter, with some passionate readers of the author speaking of «murder» perpetrated against her works and who are calling for a step back by maintaining an original edition alongside the revised and corrected one.