though honestly I thought it would be worse

I felt like rereading one of the non-poirple Agatha Christies and I decided to keep a tally of Yikes passages this time. The Secret of Chimneys is one of her more rollicking ones. I gather it's popular for this reason; probably why my mom said it's one of her favorites, but the amount of racism really is incredible.

I counted 30 Yikes passages in total. This is the one I remembered as 'racist against the Balkan region', which it really is - that accounts for most of them, because it's about a fictional Balkan country, but in addition to that, there's:

• an amazing quantity of antisemitism considering that the sole target of it was actually a wholly benevolent character, who starts and ends the book in political agreement with the protagonist and is never seriously suspected by him or the sleuths of anything else; apparently Christie just thought it would be funny and a bit exciting to paint him as illogically and disjointedly sinister



• two instances of anti-blackness, which is remarkable since there are no Black characters, not even referred to indirectly.



• a constant use of an ethnic slur for Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese people, except Christie seems to use it to cover Balkan people as well