though honestly I thought it would be worse

[cimorene]

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

Comments

[lobelia321]

I read And Then There Were None in December. I had a grammatical quibble (And then there WAS none!) until I discovered the original title of this Christie novel and forgot about grammar. The colonial-washed title the American publishers gave it wasn't any better, either.

[cimorene]

I don't know, 'and then there was none' sounds wrong to my ear - I suspect the usage in speech differs, or has regional variants at least.

[lobelia321]

Well, all is moot, given the original titles of horror.

I guess the was/ were none grammar stickling is like the To boldly go / Boldly to go one. :-D

[cimorene]

The split infinitive 'rule' was literally made up by some specific person or persons at a specific point rather recent in history due to attempting to apply rules of Latin grammar to English, or so I've heard numerous times - I don't know exactly who or when. The was/were one might be like that, but it might also just be like... two different variants of a phrase that were popular in different regions or something like that!

[lobelia321]

Well, I always interpreted the 'was none' to refer to 'was no one'. There is someone there. There is no one there. There is none there.

[cimorene]

Yes, 'no one' is the origin of none and that's why prescriptivists say it needs singular verb agreement, just like 'nobody' and 'everybody', but those don't reflect popular usage.

[lobelia321]

This is very true. Alas, Christie's original title did reflect current usage and it was NOT GOOD.