I’ve always loved mystery novels. Figuring out who did it, how and why. It’s been fun and helped me as a writer to think about a character’s motives. Was it love or money or power or a combination of the three? Reading mysteries was a great problem-solving exercise. I also reread them even though I know the endings. This has been fine and dandy until recently.

Agatha Christie. The queen of mysteries. Creator of Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple among others. Clever, thoughtful detectives who untangled confusing situations with ease and a little false modesty. When I first started to read Christie as a pre-teen, I neglected to notice one important point. She was a racist. Her foreign characters were either sneaky, untrustworthy or stupid. The lower-class English were gullible or dishonest. Natives, whether in Africa or the Middle East, were no better than dumb animals. How could I not notice what she wrote about Jews every time they were mentioned? Greedy, uncomfortably foreign (for the British) and just plain creepy.

Of course, I realize that she was writing in a time where these viewpoints were acceptable and even expected from the white upper-class English citizens. What else can we expect from a group of people who felt it acceptable to invade country after country?

Sadly, it’s time for me to retire Agatha. I’ll miss her cleverness as much as I’ll miss Hercule and Jane. Au revoir.