This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007552504

Version: 2017-04-13

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

The Secret Adversary

Partners in Crime

N or M?

By the Pricking of My Thumbs

Postern of Fate

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Tommy and Tuppence: An Introduction by John Curran

“Tommy, old thing.”

“Tuppence, old bean”

This exchange from The Secret Adversary (1922) introduces Agatha Christie readers to the detective team of Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. This light-hearted banter sets the tone not just for this book but also for the future novels and short stories in the series; although calling it a series is somewhat misleading as, unlike Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple and their extensive casebooks, there are only five Tommy and Tuppence titles. They stretch over Christie’s entire writing life, with two titles in both her first and last decade and one from mid-career. The Secret Adversary was her second published novel; while the last novel she ever wrote, Postern of Fate (1973), was also a Tommy and Tuppence. In between there was the short story collection Partners in Crime (1929) and the spy story N or M? (1941), followed by a long gap before the sinister murder-mystery By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968).

Husband-and-wife detective teams are relatively rare in crime fiction, Dashiell Hammett created Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934), their only adventure despite the half-dozen films with William Powell and Myrna Loy that featured them. Pam and Jerry North, the creation of husband-and-wife team Richard and Frances Lockridge, detected their way through twenty-six novels. And although many other detective characters have marriage partners – Inspector French, Gideon Fell, Inspector Alleyn – they are not usually active investigative partners. But Tommy and Tuppence Beresford are unique in meeting, marrying, and becoming parents and grandparents over the fifty years of their crime-solving career.

Unlike Christie’s other detective creations Tommy and Tuppence Beresford age gradually through the series, although it must be admitted that mathematically the chronology does not bear close scrutiny. When we first meet them in The Secret Adversary they are demobbed service personnel from World War I; they are a married couple running a detective agency in Partners in Crime, at the end of which Tuppence announces her pregnancy. While their children are involved in World War II, Mr. and Mrs. Beresford contribute to the war effort by chasing spies in N or M? and they are grandparents investigating a mysterious disappearance from a retirement home in By the Pricking of My Thumbs. In their final adventure the elderly Tommy and Tuppence discover the secret history of their new home in Postern of Fate.

In many ways Tuppence was the model for many of the female protagonists that Christie created throughout her career: Anne Beddingfeld in The Man in the Brown Suit (1924), Lady Eileen (Bundle) Brent in The Secret of Chimneys (1925) and The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), Emily Trefusis in The Sittaford Mystery (1931), Lady Frances Derwent in Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (1934), and Victoria Jones in They Came to Baghdad (1951). All of these females display characteristics similar to Tuppence: indefatigable curiosity, quick-witted courage, unquestioning loyalty, and a sense of humor; but Tuppence is unique in also being a wife and, later, a mother and grandmother. Unlike many female “sidekicks” Tuppence is very much an equal partner and not simply a helpless female waiting for the braver and more intelligent male to rescue her from the clutches of the evil mastermind. It is Tuppence who takes the initiative at the very beginning of The Secret Adversary in drafting the newspaper advertisement and it is her brainwave to amend it to read intriguingly “No unreasonable offer refused.” Her sangfroid takes them through their initial mysterious interview and her subsequent domestic position is a significant test of her nerve. Throughout The Secret Adversary Tuppence shares the danger equally with Tommy.

In Chapter One of The Secret Adversary Tuppence is described as having “no claim to beauty, but there was character and charm in the elfin lines of her little face, with its determined chin and large, wide-apart grey eyes that looked mistily out from under straight black brows.” Tommy’s face is “pleasantly ugly – nondescript yet unmistakably the face of a gentleman and a sportsman.” More surprisingly he is described as having “a shock of exquisitely slicked-back red hair.” With these descriptions Christie carefully avoided the clichés of the broad shoulders, tapering waist, chiseled jawline, and devil-may-care suntanned face (for the hero) and the sylph-like figure, golden tresses, exquisite beauty, and all-knowing innocence (for the heroine), which were the common attributes of fictional characters at the time.

We can believe in Tommy and Tuppence because they seem so “ordinary.” In Chapter Twenty-two of The Secret Adversary the Prime Minister and the enigmatic Mr. Carter discuss the case and the two leading protagonists. Mr. Carter gives the following succinct summary of the pair and it stands as an accurate picture of them both. “Outwardly, [Tommy is] an ordinary, clean-limbed, rather block-headed young Englishman. Slow in his mental processes. On the other hand, it’s quite impossible to lead him astray through his imagination. He hasn’t got any – so he’s difficult to deceive. He worries things out slowly, and once he’s got hold of anything he doesn’t let go. The little lady’s quite different. More intuition and less common sense. They make a pretty pair working together. Pace and stamina.”

The other series character that makes his first appearance in The Secret Adversary is Albert, a humble lift boy in the Ritz Hotel when we first make his acquaintance. Tuppence, by judicious exaggeration of her involvement in affairs nefarious, befriends him and he proves to be an invaluable ally in the course of the adventure. When next we meet him in Partners in Crime he is installed as the office boy in the detective agency and thereafter he becomes a permanent part of the Beresford household, appearing in all the novels including Postern of Fate. It is not until N or M?, however, that we learn that his surname is Batt and by then he has also acquired a wife, although her part is an off-stage one. His contribution during N or M? is somewhat incidental, but in By the Pricking of My Thumbs he is firmly installed in the Beresford household as cook/butler/factotum.

When she signed the agreement for The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie was contracted to produce a further five titles for The Bodley Head. In October 1920 she wrote to her then publisher, John Lane at The Bodley Head, inquiring about the progress of her first book and in the course of her letter she mentioned that “I’ve nearly finished a second one by this time.” So this letter puts the composition of The Secret Adversary three years earlier than its publication and this, in turn, agrees with the dialogue in Chapter One where Tommy talks of being demobbed for “ten long weary months”; if he left the army at the end of 1918 ten months later would bring him close to the end of 1919.

Christie discusses the early genesis of the book in her autobiography. She describes how, rather like Tommy in Chapter One of the finished novel, she overheard a conversation in a teashop, a conversation about someone called Jane Fish. She continues, “That, I thought, would make rather a good beginning to a story – a name overheard at a teashop – an unusual name, so that whoever heard it remembered it. A name like Jane Fish, or perhaps Jane Finn would be even better. I settled for Jane Finn and started writing straight away. I called it The Joyful Venture first – then The Young Adventurers – and finally it became The Secret Adversary.” The moniker “The Young Adventurers” resurfaces in the newspaper advertisement in Chapter One and captures the spirit of the book and its two protagonists perfectly. Christie goes on to explain that John Lane did not like The Secret Adversary as it was so different to her first book. He so feared lower sales that for a while he was not even going to publish it. But he relented and she got the princely sum of £50 for the serial rights.

The plot of The Secret Adversary has its origins some four years earlier during an actual historical fact, the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915. The ship had left New York the previous week with almost two thousand passengers (160 of them U.S. citizens) and was hit by a German torpedo off the coast of Ireland. Twelve hundred passengers drowned, among them 120 Americans. Despite German claims that it was carrying arms, the world was outraged by the sinking of a passenger ship and this angry indignation hastened the entry of the United States into the war. (Ironically, recent maritime investigations have disclosed the presence of ammunition on board.) At the time of the publication of The Secret Adversary this infamous tragedy, would have been still fresh in the public consciousness and the short opening scene on board the ill-fated ship seizes the reader’s attention. This seemingly insignificant event sets in motion a series of events into which our hero and heroine are drawn before they realize what is happening.

The main story, set some years later, begins with the chance meeting of Miss Prudence Cowley and Mr. Thomas Beresford outside the long-gone Dover Street tube station. In renewing their earlier acquaintance we learn that they have both been recently de-mobbed from the armed services and are at loose ends. They retire to a Lyons Corner House teashop (a famous chain also long gone) and update each other on their life histories. We learn that they knew each other in childhood and had become reacquainted during the war when Tommy was injured and had been a patient in the same hospital where Tuppence worked.

Tuppence is Miss Prudence Cowley, the daughter of Archdeacon Cowley (who makes a brief appearance at the close of The Secret Adversary) and the fifth of seven children. The origin of her nickname, Tuppence, is unclear, even to herself. She left home in Suffolk – not exactly reluctantly – to help the war effort and worked in various lowly positions in a hospital. Before her demobilization she also worked as a driver and in an office. Tommy’s life story is even briefer. Apart from having a rich uncle who was, at one stage, anxious to adopt him, little is known of his parents, who are both dead. He rose to the rank of lieutenant in the army and was wounded several times. Both of them are unemployed and almost penniless. This also is historical fact when the return of thousands of service personnel from World War 1 caused mass unemployment and became a major social and economic problem.

Apart from the smooth storytelling the other attractive feature of the book is the banter of the two main protagonists. The opening exchange sets the tone and this continues throughout most of the book, even in the tight corners in which they find themselves. Tuppence’s insouciant conversation with Mr. Whittington – “You heard me say yesterday that I proposed to live by my wits. It seems to me that I have now proved that I have some wits to live by!” – is matched by Tommy’s devil-may-care attitude – “‘Let’s hope the judge hasn’t put his black cap on,’ said Tommy frivolously” – during his later incarceration. Later, Tuppence’s capture of the mind and heart of Albert – “‘American Detective Force,’ she hissed. Albert fell for it. ‘Lord!’ he murmured ecstatically” – is a masterpiece of psychology and acting.

The elements that comprise The Secret Adversary are very much of the period – a fearless detective (or, in this case, two fearless detectives) battling a mysterious mastermind bent on world domination, dastardly kidnappings and daring rescues, false telegrams and forged notes, disguise and impersonation. Also thrown into the mix are a millionaire, a strange nursing home, a couple of automatically suspicious foreigners (i.e. anyone from outside Britain), and an unexplained death. From these somewhat clichéd ingredients Christie constructs a highly readable story complete with original and unexpected developments and a surprise Christie-esque revelation in the final chapter. The mysterious Mr. Brown plays the same part throughout this thriller as the unidentified murderer does in her whodunits – Mr./Mrs./Miss X waiting to be unmasked in the final chapter. She also conceals the identity of this dangerous mastermind as artfully as she did of her first killer in The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

Some elements of the book’s plot surface in later Christie stories: Tommy’s infiltration of the meeting in the house in Soho foreshadows a similar scene, seven years later, in The Seven Dials Mystery; the sinister nursing home reappears in the later Tommy and Tuppence story “The Case of the Missing Lady,” as well as the much later Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?; vitally important papers are also a feature in the play Black Coffee and the short story “The Incredible Theft.” Also, the overall point of characters pretending to be other than they are will be a constant feature of Christie’s fiction for the next fifty years. The other surprise for even well-informed Christie readers is the casual mention in Chapter Five of one Inspector Japp, normally the partner-in-crime of Hercule Poirot. He had already appeared in The Mysterious Affair at Styles and would continue to be a grudging admirer of the little Belgian for many years, and cases, to come.

Published in January 1922 in the United Kingdom and some months later in the United States, The Secret Adversary received promising press. The London Times found it “refreshingly original, the identity of the arch-criminal is cleverly concealed to the very end” while the Daily News thought it “an ingenious and exciting yarn … eminently readable.” The Saturday Review considered it “an exciting story of adventure, full of hair-breadth escapes, and many disappointments if [readers] try to guess the riddle before the author is ready to give them the clue. An excellent story.” The Daily Chronicle summed it up in a manner that prophetically foreshadowed many reviews to come: “It’s an excellent yarn and the reader will find it as impossible as we did to put it aside until the mystery had been faithfully fathomed.”

These verdicts were encouraging because The Secret Adversary was a complete change of style and pace from Christie’s first book. This first decade of her writing career found Christie searching for a formula that suited her talents. Although the whodunit was the type of book with which she was to find fame and fortune she wrote only four of them between 1920 and 1929: The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Murder on the Links, The Murder of Roger Ack-royd, and The Mystery of the Blue Train. She interspersed each of these with thrillers, which emphasized physical rather then cerebral activity – The Secret Adversary, The Man in the Brown Suit, The Big Four, and The Seven Dials Mystery – and short-story collections – Poirot Investigates, Partners in Crime, and the episodic novel The Big Four, culled from earlier short stories.

The short-story market at the time was enormous and lucrative, with a mass of fiction magazines crowding the bookstalls. The regular appearance of a short story or a series of short stories kept an author’s name in the public consciousness and, more important for the writer, represented a source of immediate income. Many crime writers appeared regularly in the pages of the multitude of magazines available – Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, Chesterton and Father Brown, Bailey and Mr. Fortune, Hornung and Raffles – and in many cases the appearance of a new story by a favorite writer was a selling point, with the name and title emblazoned on the cover. During this decade Christie wrote an enormous number of short stories for this market; most of them would subsequently appear in collections published over the next twenty years. So, the adventures of Tommy and Tuppence continued almost immediately after their first book appearance in short-story format.

The second Tommy and Tuppence book, Partners in Crime, was published in 1929. Now happily married, the Beresfords at the request of Mr. Carter from The Secret Adversary set up a detective agency and call themselves, with customary modesty, Blunt’s Brilliant Detectives. In fact, the agency is a cover for the dissemination of vital covert information as the previous owner, Mr. Theodore Blunt, was a spy. By taking over his business Tommy and Tuppence are to keep their eyes and ears open and keep Mr. Carter informed. Although this subplot surfaces from time to time in the course of the individual cases that make up the book, it is never a major, or indeed a convincing, reason for their adventures. Most of the cases undertaken by the pair are clever and entertaining but as an added bonus they tackle each case in the manner of a (then) well-known detective.

Although the collection was published in the United Kingdom in September 1929 the individual stories had appeared up to six years previously, mainly in The Sketch, the same magazine in which one Hercule Poirot first made his short-story appearance. With the exception of “The Unbreakable Alibi,” which appeared in 1928, all of the other stories appeared in 1923–24; in other words, in the year following the appearance of The Secret Adversary. Collecting them necessitated some rewriting and rearrangement before the book was issued. So for example when, in Chapter One, Tuppence says “Tommy and Tuppence were married … And six years later they were still living together,” this timeframe tallies with the publication of the book and not with the appearance of the original short story.

A major feature of Partners in Crime is the parody/pastiche element. This idea is promoted by Tommy who, in an effort to emulate the great detectives of fiction, invests in a collection of detective stories and decides to solve each case in the manner of one of his heroes. Thus “The Affair of the Pink Pearl” is solved in the manner of R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke, a pioneer in the field of scientific investigation. “The Case of the Missing Lady” is a Sherlock Homes case and indeed more than one case for the sleuth of Baker Street involved a search for a missing person. Although it is much lighter in tone it is difficult, when reading “The Case of the Missing Lady,” not to think of Holmes’ very similarly titled investigation of “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax.” Some of the characters pastiched are forgotten by modern audiences but most crime fans will fondly remember Edgar Wallace who is recalled in “The Crackler”; Father Brown in “The Man in the Mist” (one of the most accurate pastiches in the book); and Roger Sheringham, the creation of Anthony Berkeley, in “The Clergyman’s Daughter.” The persistent Inspector French, breaker of alibis, and the creation of Irishman Freeman Wills Crofts, is recalled in “The Unbreakable Alibi”; and Baroness Orczy’s Old Man in the Corner, whose modus operandi was to study the account of a crime and to solve it without leaving his ABC teashop, is cleverly captured in “The Sunningdale Mystery.” And in a clever piece of gentle self-mockery the last story of the collection features detection in the style of the great Hercule Poirot in “The Man Who Was No. 16,” a sly reference to The Big Four!

N or M? was published in 1941 and was a complete change of pace for both Christie and Tommy and Tuppence. It is set unequivocally in World War II and was written during the early days of the war. Christie alternated the writing of this with the writing of the very traditional whodunit The Body in the Library and explains in her autobiography, “I had decided to write two books at once since one of the difficulties of writing a book is that it suddenly goes stale on you.” It appears that the composition of two totally contrasting books helped to keep each of them fresh.

The Beresfords are at something of a loose end because both their children are involved in war work and communication between them is guarded. When Tommy (and Tommy only) is asked to undertake a mission at the request of a Mr. Grant, actually an ally of their old friend Mr. Carter, he agrees. A very unimpressed Tuppence takes matters into her own hands and when Tommy arrives at his supposedly secret destination it is to find her already installed, complete with a new persona. The setting, a seaside boardinghouse, is very traditional Christie territory and despite the strong presence of spies, secret agents, codes, and covert subversives the question to be answered is not so much Whodunit? but “Who Is the Spy Mastermind,” although with customary Christie ingenuity she manages to include a murder mystery at the same time, and offers clever and unexpected answers to each problem.

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