This is the first and only collection of short stories that Agatha Christie published with Tommy and Tuppence. The married spies and sometime crime solvers first showed up in The Secret Adversary in 1922, Christie’s second novel. There’s three more novels, and the one that I’ve read so far N or M, feels like a dramatic tone shift from these first two books. That’s in part because they become a kind of stand-in for Christie’s own sense of purpose being waylaid by WWII. They want to help the war effort, but Tommy was invalided out of the previous war and he’s middle-aged now, and Tuppence, well, woman. So they become domestic spies calling on old connections to gather information for the war effort.
This collection which appeared in the late 1920s has the same playful tone of the first book, with an additional silly and fun premise. And because this is Agatha Christie, we don’t need to guess at the various references being made through, because Tommy and Tuppence tell us each time. The premise is that Tommy and Tuppence need a new job, spywork being spotty and often unpaid, and so they decide to create their own detective agency. The issue is that they don’t really know how to do that. What they DO know is detective novels, which they’ve apparently read all of them. Each story including the frame story is an attempt to solve a crime based on the stylings and methods of other famous fictional detectives. Some of these have lasted since this publication, and others have faded. It’s like reading a collection from today a hundred years from now, and only really knowing a handful of the writers. The ones that I know, and I am no expert are Arthur Conan Doyle/Sherlock Holmes, GK Chesterton/Father Brown, AEW Mason (though I don’t know his detective), Edgar Wallace, and Baroness Orczy. It’s also important to mention that they also style one story after Agatha Christie’s famous Belgian detective as well. It’s a fun and referential set of stories, and of course, I barely recall a single of the cases.
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