And then they went after Agatha Christie: Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries are being 'rewritten for modern sensitivities.'

Just yesterday, The Telegraph reported that Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries are being 'rewritten for modern sensitivities.'

Dame Agatha Christie became, and remains, the best-selling novelist of all time. She is best known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, as well as the world's longest-running play – The Mousetrap.

Agatha Christie's most famous novels include And Then There Were None (1939), Murder on the Orient Express (1933), The ABC Murders (1936), etc.

But many of her beloved works are going to be altered now. Passages containing descriptions, insults, references to ethnicity, or physical descriptions (of non-Caucasian characters) will all be removed.

The following are some examples.

The 1937 novel Death on the Nile is mostly set in the African continent.

At one point in the novel, a character complains about a group of children pestering her as follows:

“…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 above text was altered as follows:

“They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children”.

Descriptions of a black servant, who is originally described as grinning as he understands to stay silent, is now described as neither black nor smiling but simply “nodding.”

References to the word ‘Oriental’ has been removed, and so have references to the Nubian people.

In a new edition of A Caribbean Mystery from 1964, Miss Marple’s musing that a West Indian hotel worker smiling at her has “such lovely white teeth” has been removed, and other references to teeth have been removed.

Even flattering descriptions were not spared because they apply to people of color.

A female character described of as having “a torso of black marble such as a sculptor would have enjoyed” has been removed.

In Christie’s 1920 debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Poirot notes the following about a character called Dr. Bauerstein.

"He is, of course, a German by birth, though he has practiced so long in this country that nobody thinks of him as anything but an Englishman. He was naturalized about fifteen years ago. A very clever man—a Jew, of course.”

The reference to the character's Jewishness has been removed.

In the same book, all references to gypsies have been removed.

If you’ve watched any of the more contemporary adaptations of Miss Marple starring I believe Geraldine McEwan, they have already rewritten a lot of the stories to appeal to a modern audience, and that was a decade or more ago. I’ve had to stop watching them, they do not at all reflect the time in which they were written, a century ago. If we want updated mores and values we will watch mysteries written in this day and age. There are plenty of those.

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