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MOSCOW, March 26 The works of the English writer Agatha Christie (1890 — 1976) have been edited for publication by HarperCollins to be removed from new editions passages that may hurt the feelings of certain readers, the British newspaper Telegraph reported.
According to the publication, we are talking about new editions that are only planned to be released or that have already been published in the period from 2020. The redacted texts of works written between 1920 and 1976 include, among other things, the removal of passages containing «descriptions, insults or references to ethnicity».
It is noted that in a number of cases, changes were made to the narrative on behalf of the author, including through the internal monologue of Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot, two of Christie's legendary characters. Fragments of the statements of «antipathetic» characters were also cut out.
For example, from the novel «Death on the Nile» (1937), a fragment of a statement by Mrs. Allerton, in which she complained about the «disgusting» eyes and noses of a group of children, disappeared, and from the novel «The Mysterious Affair at Stiles» (1920), Poirot's words about another character that he was «of course a Jew» disappeared.
The word «Indian» was removed from the original expression «his Indian character» in the collection «Miss Marple's Last Affairs and Two Stories» (1979) in the new version of the text, and the word «Indian» was removed from the novel «The Caribbean Mystery» (1964) deleted a whole passage where the character did not see a black girl in the bushes at night.
Agatha Christie's books are among the most published in the history of mankind. The writer is also among the most translated authors.