This has been stripped down in a new edition to state: “They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children”.

Vocabulary has also been altered, with the term “Oriental” removed.

Other descriptions in the story have been altered in some instances, with one black servant, who is originally described as grinning as he understands to stay silent about an incident, now described as neither black nor smiling but simply “nodding”.

In a new edition of A Caribbean Mystery, the 1964 Miss Marple novel, the amateur detective’s musing that a West Indian hotel worker smiling at her has “such lovely white teeth”, has been removed, with similar references to “beautiful teeth” also taken out.

The same book described a prominent female character as having “a torso of black marble such as a sculptor would have enjoyed”, an observation absent from the edited version.

Other descriptors have also been changed, with references to the Nubian people - an ethnic group which has lived in Egypt for millennia - removed in many instances from Death on the Nile, resulting in “the Nubian boatman” becoming simply “the boatman”.

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Dialogue in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Christie’s 1920 debut novel, has been altered, so where Poirot once noted that another character is “a Jew, of course”, he now makes no such comment.

In the same book, a young woman described as being “of gypsy type” is now simply “a young woman”, and other references to gipsies have been removed from the text. The 1979 collection, Miss Marple’s Final Cases, includes the character of an Indian judge who grows angry demanding his breakfast.

The original text describes “his Indian temper”, a phrase changed to say “his temper”. References to “natives” have also been removed, or replaced with the word “local”.

Across the revised books, racial descriptions have been altered or removed, including an entire passage in A Caribbean Mystery, where a character fails to see a black woman in some bushes at night as he walks to his hotel room. The N-word is taken out of revised edition, in both Christie’s prose and the dialogue spoken by her characters. Changes have also been made across her novels Final Cases and Sleeping Murder.

It is not the first time Christie’s works have been altered. Her 1939 novel, And Then There Were None,was previously published under a different title that included a racist term.

Agatha Christie Limited, a firm run by James Pritchard, the author’s great-grandson, is understood to handle licensing for her literary and film rights. The company and HarperCollins have been contacted for comment.

The Telegraph, London

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