For some light(er)-hearted Partners in Crime: Christie's Tommy and Tuppence

It seems like I’ve referenced quite enough of dark, grim, gritty, realistic, noir, and what-have-you in the last couple of posts, so I’m deliberately pivoting to something a bit lighter for this entry.

How about a slightly comic, sly, and knowing look at the classic mystery genre without much (at all!) bloodshed? Clever without being too clever, comic with a gentle wink-wink-nod-nod approach that almost all readers of detective fiction can feel they share in. In short, how about Tommy and Tuppence Beresford?

When it comes to Agatha Christie’s series detectives, I have already confessed that Hercule Poirot was the one I initially read the entire opus for. Then, sweet Miss Marple’s. Ok, so admittedly perhaps Tommy and Tuppence are in an unenviable third place, but I still have a soft spot for the couple who made their first appearance in The Secret Adversary (1922), only two years after Hercule Poirot himself made his debut in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), and long before Miss Marple’s Murder at the Vicarage (1930).

For myself, I quite enjoyed getting introduced to the scrappy duo—before they were actually a couple—in The Secret Adversary and its cloak-and-dagger post-WWI international intrigue, but if you don’t know yet whether you wish to invest time for a full-length novel, Partners in Crime (1929) might be just the ticket for you. This short-story collection is set several years after their debut, when they are now a married couple operating a not-exactly flourishing private detective agency (as a cover) for which they also employ an assistant named Albert, a character also introduced in their first novel.

Partners in Crime nicely ages the still-young couple from 1922 who enjoyed the adventure of their globe-trotting earlier mystery but who now feel somewhat stifled in their more mundane lives. You can really sense how especially the charming and outgoing Tuppence might chafe at the socially more acceptable charade she must participate in of having to play (for reasons we discover in the first story “A Fairy in the Flat”) the very able confidential secretary “Miss Robinson” to her employer Tommy, the detective “Mr. Blunt.”

If you want to check out the filmed versions first, please seek out the 1983 version with Francesca Annis and James Warwick (an episode is linked below) which should be available at your local public libraries or on BritBox—or variously on YouTube. The more recent version which premiered in 2016, starring David Walliams and Jessica Raine, almost appears to go out of its way to make the couple more bumbling than satiric.

While Partners in Crime does contain individual mysteries to be solved (within a broader arc to give it structure), the stories are perhaps even more entertaining for the knowing and slightly ironic perspective they take towards classic detective fiction.

For example, in “The Case of the Missing Lady,” Tommy and Tuppence talk to an explorer recently returned—as they know from having read about him in the papers—from an expedition. In the first few minutes of the Annis-Warwick version, when Tommy as Mr. Blunt makes a seemingly casual guess about their guest’s recent adventure, the impressed Mr. Stavansson exclaims in surprise, “But, this is amazing! I thought detectives only did such things in books!” Tommy then pulls his best Sherlock Holmes mimicry: “No, it was nothing…. The rays of the midnight sun in the arctic circle contain, um, certain….properties, and they have a peculiar action on the skin. I’ll write a little monograph on this subject shortly.”

Detective fiction with a sardonic self-referentiality without being annoyingly smarter-than-thou about it. Do try Partners in Crime!