Leave Agatha Christie Alone

Quick. Check your bookshelves. If you have any Agatha Christie novels put them under lock and key.

They’re going to be worth serious money someday.

Perhaps you heard, Christie’s brilliant mysteries that have endured for more than 80 years are getting a “woke makeover.”

Yep, snot-nosed 20-something copywriters at HarperCollins are purging her wonderful works of “offensive” language on the advice of a team of “sensitivity readers.” They are sniffing out language that offends their delicate sensibilities. And if it renders Christie’s books bland and colorless, so be it. We cannot have books being read that might offend the fragile flowers of Gen Z.

There is no widespread objection to Christie’s works or outcry in the literary world over the language she used. Quite the contrary. They continue to sell well and perhaps her most famous novel, “Murder on the Orient Express” has been turned into a major motion picture at least twice: in 1974 and again in 2017.

Christie, who is said to be the best-selling novelist of all time after penning 66 novels and 14 collections of short stories, is now having untalented writers rework all of her Miss Marple novels and some of her Hercule Poirot series.

News reports say these censors are removing all references to ethnicity.

Take, for instance, this change in the timeless “Death on the Nile:” In one passage, Agatha Christie described a “Nubian boatman.” Can’t you just see the person guiding the boat? A statuesque man with dark good looks. In the revised version, he is simply “a boatman.”

What exactly does that barebones word conjure? Absolutely nothing.

Nubians, as most educated people know, are members of a distinctive ethnic group from northern Sudan and Egypt where they have lived for millennia. It is not a racial slur. It is a descriptor. And a good one.

Don’t take my word for it:

Think about it, a Swedish boatman would look quite different from a Greek boatman and that person would look different from a Japanese boatman. Describing someone by their ethnicity is one way authors engage their reader’s imagination.

It’s unlikely that progressive publishing houses will abandon their mission to ruin the great classics. They’re just getting started. They’ve already wrecked Ronald Dahl’s and Ian Fleming’s works. Who’s next, I wonder? Ernest Hemingway? J.D. Salinger? F. Scott Fitzgerald?

My advice: Buy up old books and put them in a safe place. Your grandchildren and great-grandchildren will thank you for it.