Caroline: Time passes and the world changes — we hope that it largely changes for the better, although the evidence for that might not yet satisfy the best detectives. Still, it is to be expected that the language and beliefs that were commonplace and unremarkable a hundred years ago are approached differently now.
For anyone who publishes or reads books from an earlier era, then, this poses a challenge. Do we accept these texts as they are, as artefacts from a previous time, even if they contain ideas and words we would never condone in something published today? Or do we treat them as malleable properties, capable of shifting and changing with the times to meet the ideals of a new era and beyond?
Golden age detective fiction certainly isn’t immune from this dilemma. These are books that many people read for pleasure, for comfort even. It’s an emotive question, both because of the feelings that the presence of prejudice in beloved mysteries arouses, and because, for some, the idea of changing a work that an admired author had deemed complete is disagreeable.
Which is why, today, we’re going to talk about it all, starting with the most revered author of them all: Agatha Christie.
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Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton. A quick reminder before we get into it today: I’m doing a special free live episode of the podcast on 15th July at 7pm UK time, in which I, together with guest Teresa Peschel, will be talking about the film adaptations of Agatha Christie’s novels. There also be a live chat and Q&A, so head to shedunnitshow.com/liveepisode now or click the link in the episode description to be able to join us.
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Those questions that I posed right at the start of the episode — to edit or not to edit, essentially — are not new. Publishers, authors and readers have been grappling with this for decades, if not longer in fact, as new generations have come into contact with works from the past and felt moved to make changes to them. But in the last few years, coverage of this process has intensified, as edits to works by high profile and popular authors like Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl have attracted attention. In March of this year, Agatha Christie joined their ranks, when it was reported that in the latest reissues of her novels passages, mainly containing references to or insults about race and ethnicity, had been reworked or removed. Since Agatha Christie is such a beloved and popular author, this news sparked a fresh wave of discussion about whether this is the right approach to books from the past among the golden age detective fiction communities that this podcast serves. With this episode, I want to address both what is being changed in Christie’s books but also the wider question of how we might best approach offensive language in texts from previous times. And to do that, I’ve enlisted the help of an expert: someone who works on racism and eugenics, has curated museum exhibitions grappling with uncomfortable aspects of history, and who is also a huge fan of detective fiction.
Subhadra: My name is Subhadra Das, I’m a historian, and I write about science and society.
Caroline: To start with, I want to take this right back to the beginning, and think about what it is like from the reader’s perspective to encounter an offensive phrase or slur while enjoying your favourite detective fiction. Here’s Subhadra with an example of this from her own life.
Subhadra: Well, I’m speaking from a personal point of view, having had this happen to me. So just to paint a picture for you I listen to books as a way to get to sleep at night because that’s the world we live in. And I was listening to a G.K. Chesterton short story, which is a lovely way to fall asleep until completely unannounced and completely to my real shock and surprise, there was the N word.
Now Chesterton for me, has always felt like a safe space because the Father Brown stories are brilliant detective stories. There is a moral element to them that I find intriguing, interesting, comforting. And G.K. Chesterton was pretty much the only public figure in the 1920s to speak out against the eugenics movement. So for me, he felt like a safe space. So when that happened, just as you’re trying to get to sleep as well. I mean, there wasn’t much sleep that followed from that.
Caroline: I’ve had a similar experience myself — being jolted out of the pleasant experience of reading an author I really admire by suddenly encountering a term or attitude that I don’t want to think that they believed was acceptable to publish. This is about more than readers being precious or overly sensitive, especially when it comes to slurs like the one Subhadra encountered in that Chesterton story.
Subhadra: There is a genuine shock and horror associated with these words. It’s not simply that they are offensive, they are derogatory, they are dehumanising. It’s not a question of, and already I’m going to fall into the language of this discourse. It’s not about us being snowflakey. These are horrible words. And so when you encounter them, it would be a natural thing to be shocked and upset.
Caroline: Over the years that I’ve been making Shedunnit, this is something that I’ve heard from listeners about a lot — people sharing their experiences of reading the work of a beloved author, only to find instances of racism, or antisemitism, or other kinds of prejudiced language that stops them in their tracks and takes the shine off the whole book. As Subhadra described with G.K. Chesterton, it can be really unpleasant to have to confront the fact that a writer you like and feel close to had views or used language that you find completely unacceptable. And since publishers today are in the business of selling books and keeping readers happy, it makes a superficial kind of sense that they would want as few people as possible to have this unpleasant experience. Get rid of the bad words, get rid of the bad vibes, right? But it really isn’t as simple as just doing a few quick edits — far from it.
Subhadra: So the example that I just gave you, that is a really straightforward change to make. That word does not need to be on the page, in my ears, at all. But there are wider aspects to attitudes to do with racism particularly, but more broadly what I would call eugenic thinking. To my mind, eugenics makes race a broad church. It encompasses ideas of disability, gender, class size, all of these things where we know that there is systemic injustice in our society, are encompassed in this idea, and then the words that express them. And sometimes it’s as straightforward as a slur.
So for example, the N word is overtly a slur. This isn’t complicated to remove it. But within the world of the writers and their attitudes, and I say this in terms of the world they were living in, which is the world that we continue to live in, there are wider aspects to do with social injustice and how that is structured in our society that is much more difficult to simply exorcise as an editing exercise.
Caroline: There are instances where overt slurs can be easily cut from a text. But what we can’t so easily get rid of is the attitudes that surround such words and the context that made it acceptable to include them in a detective novel in the first place. In considering how we handle that, things quickly get much more complicated. There are four main ways that a publisher can go, Subhadra says.
Subhadra: I think the options are: one, do nothing. The second is, leave the works as they are with a disclaimer. So this is in the museum and heritage sector, what we call ‘retain and explain’, which to my mind is good, but not everyone is necessarily an academic, and not everyone necessarily wants to take an academic approach, particularly when they’re reading for pleasure.
Another option is remove offensive terms and phrases without any explanation or context. And then there is, there is my favourite which is the most difficult one, which is that we need to become a less, we need to become a less racist, ableist, sexist, classist and sizeist society. Obviously some of these are easier to achieve than others.
Caroline: It seems that for now Agatha Christie’s publishers have chosen option three: alter the texts without any addition, such as a footnote or introduction acknowledging the change. Other publishers of golden age detective fiction are trying different things. The British Library Crime Classics imprint, for instance, which often republishes long out of print works from the early decades of the twentieth century, now includes a disclaimer in the front of every book acknowledging that some of the language and views expressed might not be what we would choose today, and inviting reader feedback on it. The American Mystery Classics series does something similar, with offensive language noted and contextualised in the introduction. This is more like the “retain and explain” option Subhadra described that we’re starting to see become more common in museums and galleries. Although there is certainly a case for saying that not everybody comes to detective fiction excited to read a critical essay about the history and problems of the text first, when done well this approach can add to the reading experience, rather than detracting from it.
Subhadra: One of my favourite editions is one of the publications of Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four, with an introduction by a scholar called Shafquat Towheed, who talks about the colonial aspect to that story and how it was written. And when you read that introduction, it completely changes your view as to who these characters are, when this story is happening, who this writer is, what their motivations are. To me, it makes the whole thing so much richer and enjoyable as an experience. It means that the problematic stuff is in there but I feel better equipped and kind of more engaged with trying to address it or deal with it as a reader.
Caroline: One interesting point I’ve seen made with regards to the “do nothing” option is that we should leave these texts as they are, slurs and offensive attitudes intact, so that readers be educated by them and not repeat the mistakes of the past. It’s a rather privileged view, I think, to insist that everybody should have to read unpleasant language so that they can learn from it. And perhaps that’s wishful thinking, anyway, to believe that the world has changed enough for that to happen.
Subhadra: In a way I see a lot of value in that, but again, it’s quite an academic approach to things and it does require a level of social change and a level of social conversation that I don’t think we’re at in my experience. At the moment, I think unfortunately we’re still at the stage where people are shouting at each other about what should be and shouldn’t be said in quite extreme and polemic terms.
The thing that you’ve described requires a bit more nuance, and I’m afraid we’re not quite there yet. Hopefully we will be one day. I think we’re moving in the right direction because I think the vast majority of people exist in that nuanced and middle space. I don’t think anyone really particularly enjoys shouting at each other.
Caroline: What I can’t get away from when thinking about all of this is that this is a genre that was always intended to entertain — we study it seriously now, but golden age detective fiction was not written to do anything other than bring amusement and pleasure to its many, many readers. Turning these texts into layered, annotated editions with scholarly introductions feels somewhat antithetical to their original purpose, which was, above all, fun. This is yet another consideration we have to balance here, I think, and weigh the advantages of unacknowledged editing against the obligation to be transparent with readers and start a discussion about what has been done and why.
Subhadra: I think I’m not comfortable with ‘remove the terms in the absence of the conversation’. By the way that that doesn’t apply to slurs. I think slurs are offensive and they need to be removed entirely. Although that being said, what counts as a slur is something that is also, you know, up- it shouldn’t be up for contention, but I think racist slurs and are recognised as such in much clearer ways than ableist slurs are, for example, which are just rife in our language and rife in the way that people speak. These things do change as time goes on. The changes need to be reflective of where our society is. I would argue they need to be slightly further ahead in the interests of greater social justice.
Caroline: After the break — the surprisingly long history of editing Agatha Christie.
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Caroline: When the news came out recently about these edits being made to Agatha Christie’s books, some of the more outraged reactions focused on the idea that these were sacred texts, left untouched as the author had envisioned them, that were now being meddled with. But this obscures the reality, which is that Christie’s work has been edited and updated throughout its existence, both during her lifetime and after. One very obvious and famous example is 1939 novel that we now know by the title And Then There Were None — which is in fact its third title. In the UK it was originally published with the title Ten Little N-words, while in the US that was deemed too offensive even in the late 1930s, and it appeared there both as And Then There Were None and as Ten Little Indians. The title was later changed in the UK as well. And this is far from the only example of this.
Subhadra: Her American publishers were pretty much in real time editing for antisemitism particularly. So the fact that some of the stories and particularly with the titles, there were changes made to bypass this for the American audience. Just throw a bit of shade on the fact that clearly British audiences were thought to be perfectly happy with it. Which may or may not be the case. I think it’s a bit more complex than that, but yeah, these changes were happening in her lifetime.
Caroline: Antisemitism is often to be found in the pages of Agatha Christie novels and other detective fiction from the 1920s and 1930s in a very overt and blatant way — a reflection of the attitude to Jewish people in Britain pre-Second World War. We have the casual prejudice shown towards Dr Bauerstein in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, of whom another character says “I’ve had enough of the fellow hanging about. He’s a Polish Jew, anyway”, and Oliver Manders in Three Act Tragedy, about whom sleuth Mr Sattersthwaite thinks there is something a bit foreign, before correcting himself with the phrase “not foreign – Jew” after hearing someone else refer to Oliver as a “slippery Shylock”. Jewish financiers and traders frequently crop up in her fiction too, the age-old stereotype of the money-obsessed Jew well in evidence. In at least one instance, this has been the focus of modern editors’ attention, with a reference to Dr Bauerstein’s Jewishness removed from The Mysterious Affair at Styles. But where these characteristics and these prejudices are baked into the function of a mystery’s plots, it’s a little harder to see how they can be removed.
Subhadra: With Christie, it’s a little bit more complex because I do think she plays with ideas to do with class and race in ways that confound people’s expectations. So yeah, this is way more complex than just changing words on pages. You’d have to rewrite all of the stories. And then they wouldn’t be the same stories.
Caroline: Part of Christie’s genius was for using assumption and bias as a way to throw the reader off the scent. Sometimes it is easy to see that she is including slurs or offensive terms just because that’s the word she would normally use, but in other cases, the expression of attitudes we now find unacceptable can be part of the mechanism of the plot. One reason why her plots still work so well for us today, Subhadra says, is that we haven’t moved on that far from the world of ideas that Christie inhabited.
Subhadra: I think one of the reasons why her stories remain so popular and so good actually today is because she was remarkably adept at playing with people’s preconceptions about stereotypes and stereotype characters. What she did was she pulled the rug out from under her readers, having very carefully laid that rug for them to step on based on what she knew their preconceptions and their biases were.
And I would argue that when it comes to things like race and disability particularly, but gender as well and also class, pretty much all of those systemic biases exist in our time as existed in hers, and that’s why her work is still readable and understandable and still works as a puzzle. It’s really sad actually, that things haven’t really changed in a hundred years.
Caroline: Editing a writer like Agatha Christie comes with the danger that you remove something other than an offensive term by mistake, and then something is lost from the book. Subhadra has spotted one such example from what we know has been changed in Christie’s books so far.
Subhadra: From what I understand, it’s a lot of characterisations of black people that focus solely on appearance of things like their skin colour, for example, characters being described with skin like black marble or things to do with their lips and teeth, which are various stereotypical racist ways of referring to black people.
But there was one that did puzzle me, which is one from Death on the Nile, and it’s Mrs Allerton talking about Egyptian children bothering people for baksheesh or selling things. So I’m gonna quote the thing here. The original line was: ‘And their eyes are simply disgusting and so are their noses, and I don’t believe I really like children.’
What’s interesting is that it’s the reference to the eyes and the noses has been removed. And this is something that because we don’t do anymore, I think people don’t think about it, that the ways in which people were racialised and the ways in which racial stereotypes and racist thinking was promulgated in earlier society was to do with assumptions to be made about physical features.
Eyes and noses. There’s a lot of stereotyping around quote “Jewish” noses, for example, or almond shaped eyes when talking about Asian characters. These are euphemisms, but they’re overtly racist in how they work. So I can understand why references to non-white characters would be changed when they reference eyes and noses. But in this case, I think she was just saying that they were a bit snotty. That one feels like we’ve lost something there as well.
Caroline: Then there are other instances where the editing just seems to help things make a little more sense for the modern reader.
Subhadra: I know that one of the terms that has been removed was some military character in an Agatha Christie was described as having an Indian temper. I didn’t know what that meant, and I looked it up and I just got a whole load of lentil recipes. Because tempering is what you do to make dal tasty. But yeah, so sometimes it’s often the case, and I really enjoyed your earlier episode about this, the whole pip and emma type situation. This isn’t our language anymore. Some of these terms have fallen out of use, or they’re idioms that we’re no longer familiar with. So, to a certain degree, there’s an element of reeducation in racist or colonialist terms that might have to be done to make these things sensible.
Caroline: The conversation about the power that offensive language has can get very stuck on famous big name authors like Christie, and they end up becoming a figurehead for a debate that is actually much broader than just changes being made to the work of one or two writers.
Subhadra: She’s iconic. She’s emblematic. Of things that she wasn’t even necessarily trying to do at her time. It’s not her fault that her career spans 50 years, excuse me. She’s writing and being published from the 1920s into the 1970s, that is a huge swath of time to cover. And she’s a different writer at the end of her career than she was at her, at the beginning.
Caroline: Because Christie is so famous and her work has been so enduring, the idea that her books might be altered becomes a conduit for outrage. She can be coopted into a narrative that really has very little to do with the details of her books or her language, Subhadra says.
Subhadra: I don’t know whether you’ve heard, but there’s a culture war on. I think it’s important that I tell you that because there’s no, like, in our day-to-day lives, none of us know. And in point of fact none of us care. Apart from what is a very vocal, I don’t want to say a vocal minority, because that sounds like it’s actually a bunch of people that you know, that care and have taken time to think about it.
There are agents within our society that are mobilised against anything that seems like it might be moving in the direction of us becoming fairer, more just and just generally more caring about everyone within our society. Capitalism is the thing that is inherent in all of these things.
And we had these conversations about the big name authors who are, you know, the best sellers. There’s a reason why it’s Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, and not necessarily other better established, well sorry, other well-known, but potentially less canonical, I guess in, in terms of society because… This might be a little bit unfair but literature’s not as big a deal in our culture, I think, maybe than it used to be.
So there are plenty of other writers from this time period, so, you know, early decades of the 20th century whose works are still in circulation that would not nearly be the focus of this much attention. But Christie particularly, I think is held up in these ways. Christie’s contemporaries, Sayers, Allingham, Tey, Marsh would not raise the same level because they’re just not as sparky in terms of being a touch paper of conversation within our society. Their names aren’t as recognisable, and therefore they can’t be used in the same way to stir up hatred or trouble.
So I think when you hear noise around this conversation, that’s where that noise is coming from. But I genuinely believe it’s not representative of the whole of our society. I don’t think the vast majority of people think in that way.
Caroline: These books are always going to be “of their time”. No amount of superficial editing, of removing slurs so that the widest possible variety of people can enjoy them a little bit more easily, is going to change that. But I hope what our conversation today has shown as well is that there is no obvious route to take here, no clearly superior template for publishers to apply to every text. There’s a lot of complexity and nuance here to navigate, whether they choose to retain and explain, edit without acknowledgement, or leave these books as they are. Acknowledging that, that there is no definitive path through this, can be a very important step forward.
Subhadra: I think that it’s so refreshing. And I can understand why people would want to have quote, you know, a right solution or a correct way of doing things when addressing what is clearly systemic injustice. But I think it’s, yeah, it is not so straightforward. For a long time, nothing was what was happening. I think now something is happening to the degrees to which that something is the right thing or the wrong thing to do or done in the right way or the wrong way. As long as we’re having the conversation, I’m happy.
Caroline: Part of the anxiety and tension around this whole issue, I think, does stem from the fact there is no definitely right way to edit Agatha Christie, or indeed any other writer in this situation. We just have to keep trying and keep talking about it.
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This episode of Shedunnit was hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. Thanks to my guest Subhadra Das — you can find more information about her work including her forthcoming book at her website subhadradas.com or at shedunnitshow.com/editingagathachristie. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.
If you enjoyed this episode and you’d like to hear more from me beyond the fortnightly episodes on this feed, join the Shedunnit Book Club, where I make extra bonus episodes every month for supporters. Find out more and sign up now at shedunnitbookclub.com/join.
Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from Connor McLoughlin.
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