Agatha Christie and the mystery of the missing swearwords

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/31/agatha-christie-mystery-of-missing-swearwords

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I’d written a crime short story under one of my pen names for a collection to be published by Macmillan (Writers tell couple who remove ‘filth’ from books where to stick their app, 28 March). The late Lord (George) Hardinge of Penshurst was in charge of their crime fiction at the time and he rang me one day pre-publication to say in his magnificently polite voice that he might be able to persuade Agatha Christie to contribute a story. He knew her from when he worked at Collins. He said it would be good for sales, and therefore good for all of us, if she agreed. I said this would be great. But he added that Agatha hated bad language and that there was some of this in my story. He said he didn’t like to think of her coming into her drawing room and picking up the book with this tainted story in it alongside hers. I asked what we’d better do. He said I should take out the offending words. I asked which. He said all of them, “from piss to fuck”. I went silent. He must have gathered I was shocked. He said that if Agatha didn’t come up with the story I could put all the words back in at the proofs stage. I was young in the trade and weakly consented. She did provide a tale. I saw no surge in sales.James TuckerSully, Vale of Glamorgan

• Your article about the Clean Reader app reminds me of WH Smith’s dirty books cupboard, which I inherited when I took over responsibility for the company’s book buying in 1974. It was in the days of moral rearmament and a paternalist attitude that is difficult to imagine today, and Smith, then by far the biggest bookseller in the country, saw it as its duty to preserve the country’s morals by preventing the sale of books it judged to be rude.

These assessments used very simple rules. Staff, presumably incorruptible, in the central buying area were required to go through suspect titles with a red pen and underline every appearance of a defined list of rude words, and then to count how many times each appeared. A decision based on these numbers would be made to either ban the book entirely from Smith’s shelves, restrict it to “customer’s orders only”, or allow its sale unrestricted.

The gradations of rudeness were less precise than the counting process. My predecessor, who started to question the company’s policy, prompted by increasingly angry publishers, challenged his boss, the director responsible for everything sold in the shops, to clarify the rules: “Ten fucks and it’s OK, but 11 and it’s not: is that how you want us to make our decisions?” Absurd then, just as Clean Reader is absurd now.Michael PountneyLondon