The news is depressing, so I have been on an Agatha Christie kick: Reading her Miss Marple series of murder mysteries.

And (horrors!) in this one, not only did a character use the N word, not in anger but in a benign description (of a black servant), but quite a few times, elderly ladies are called "old Pussies".

Must get my smelling salts...

my copy is old, so presumably some politically correct editor will have corrected this in the later editions.

I first ran across Agatha Christie when I read them in Africa: her books tended to get passed around. Most of them were in German, but usually I could follow what she was saying, (which says more about her ability to write simply than it does about my facility in German).


unlike "modern" mysteries, they do not include graphic sex and sadism. Sigh.
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