Said Tuppence. ‘I don’t think the Intelligence is anything like what it was in our day.’
Tommy said gravely: ‘It will attain its former brilliance now we’re back in it.’
(Chapter 2)
‘I’m a widower,’ said Tommy with dignity. ‘My wife died ten years ago at Singapore.’
‘Why at Singapore?’
‘We’ve all got to die somewhere. What’s wrong with Singapore?’
(Chapter 2)
‘I’m with you, Meadowes. I’m with you. Women are all very well in their place, but not before breakfast.’
(Crusty old Major Bletchley, Chapter 2)
‘I have often noticed that being a devoted wife saps the intellect,’ murmured Tommy.
‘And where have you noticed that?’ demanded Tuppence.
‘Not from you, Tuppence. Your devotion has never reached those lengths.’
(Chapter 2)
Flattery, in Tuppence’s opinion, should always be laid on with a trowel where a man was concerned.
(Chapter 7)
‘It’s an idea, that.’
‘I know—but it’s awfully like a spy story. It doesn’t seem real somehow.’
(Chapter 8)
The Tommy and Tuppence series
I hadn’t fully understood the place of Tommy and Tuppence in Agatha Christie’s oeuvre i.e. that she wrote 5 novels and a collection of short stories about them i.e. that they constitute a series, in much the same way as there’s the Poirot series and the Miss Marple series, albeit on a much smaller scale (Poirot 33 novels, 51 short stories; Marple 12 novels, 20 short stories; Tommy & Tuppence 5 novels and 12 short stories).
Tommy and Tuppence’s first adventure
Pukka ex-soldier Tommy Beresford (wounded twice in the Great War) and Prudence ‘Tuppence’ Cowley (daughter of an archdeacon), first appeared in Christie’s second published novel, The Secret Adversary, in 1922. This is a high-spirited spy adventure romp overflowing with all sorts of silliness. From one angle the best bit is the opening chapter where old friends Tommy and Tuppence bump into each other in London, discover that they’re both unemployed and stony broke, and whimsically decide to hire themselves out as freelance problem solvers under the high-spirited name The Young Adventurers Ltd.
They’ve barely done so before they are, indeed, roped into an awfully big adventure, involving a secret international organisation devoted to undermining British society and overthrowing the government which only they can save us from. Two hundred thrilling, ridiculous pages later, you will not be surprised to learn that they do indeed a) expose the evil mastermind behind the fiendish conspiracy and b) save the day.
Tommy and Tuppence return
In a sense the interesting thing about Tommy and Tuppence is that she then dropped them for nearly 20 years, as she moved away from her early international espionage novels to develop the character of Hercule Poirot and subject the crime or detective novel to all kinds of experiments and innovations in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s.
Thus ‘N or M?’, the second Tommy and Tuppence novel, was published in 1941, 19 years after we first met our plucky adventurers. The second interesting thing about it is that Christie let her characters age so that when we meet them again, 19 years have passed in the fictional world as in the real world. They are now a comfortable middle-aged couple with two grown-up children, Derek and Deborah.
Britain at war
And Britain is at war again. It’s a war novel. Maybe that explains the gap. ‘The Secret Adversary’ invoked the paranoid mood of the immediate post-war period, with political chaos across the continent and widespread unrest in Britain. As that faded away, so did Christie’s interest in it and her detective novels become more private and small-scale. Hmm. That probably doesn’t stand up to serious investigation but it’s a rought thought…
But the eruption of the Second World War and the revival of the same atmosphere of fear and anxiety and paranoia maybe made her recall her two adventurers who had thrived in the same atmosphere two decades earlier.
Mr Grant explains the mission
Anyway, the opening setup is fairly flimsy and designed to get us to the actual situation as quickly as possible. So the war has started and both Tommy and Tuppence are frustrated because they’ve tried to get jobs, Tommy in the Army, Tuppence in any other capacity, and both been rejected on the grounds of age. It’s while grousing about this one evening that there’s a knock on the door of their service flat and a ‘Mr Grant’ introduces himself. ‘A broad-shouldered man with a big fair moustache and a cheerful red face’, Grant tells them he is an associate of Lord Easthampton, the title awarded to the man who, as plain ‘Mr Carter’, had been Tommy and Tuppence’s controller during their first adventure all those years ago.
Having established his bona fides, Grant announces that he has a job for Tommy who is, of course, delighted. He asks for privacy and so Tuppence obediently leaves the room – only to nip round to an adjoining room and listen through the door.
Grant tells Tommy that ‘they’ are going to give him a cover story and he’s to tell everyone, including his wife, that he’s being sent to Scotland to carry out office work. In reality, he’ll then double back and come all the way south across England, through London and on to the South Coast, because this is where the mission is really located.
Grant tells him that British Intelligence know about a quite alarming number of spies and fifth columnists at work in Britain, quite high up, in all the services.
We know that there are at least two highly placed in the Admiralty—that one must be a member of General G——’s staff—that there are three or more in the Air Force, and that two, at least, are members of the Intelligence, and have access to Cabinet secrets. We know that because it must be so from the way things have happened. The leakage—a leakage from the top—of information to the enemy, shows us that.
The trouble is that, precisely because these traitors are embedded in the system, they know all the usual undercover operatives and have access to all secret service files about missions and so on. What they really need is an amateur, an outsider, someone unknown – and this is where Tommy comes in!
He is to replace a man they had on the job but who was just recently run over and killed. Apparently an accident but very possibly because he was getting too close and so had to be eliminated. This chap’s name was Farquar and before he died he managed to utter the cryptic phrase:
“N or M. Song Susie”
Grant reassures him that this means a lot more than first glance. The intelligence services know that the initials N and M refer:
to two of the most important and trusted German agents. We have come across their activities in other countries and we know just a little about them. It is their mission to organise a Fifth Column in foreign countries and to act as liaison officer between the country in question and Germany. N, we know, is a man. M is a woman. All we know about them is that these two are Hitler’s most highly trusted agents and that in a code message we managed to decipher towards the beginning of the war there occurred this phrase – “Suggest Nor M for England. Full powers.”
So much for the first half of the message. This Farquar fellow had a return ticket to the south coast resort of Leahampton in his pocket. On the coast! Good location for spies to be dropped or picked up or organise enemy landings etc.
Like all the other south coast resorts Leahampton has lots of private hotels and guesthouses and among them is one called Sans Souci. Intelligence think that when Farquar, whose foreign languages weren’t very good, said ‘Song Suzi’ he was in fact referring to this guest house.
So Tommy’s mission is simple. Check in at the Sans Souci guesthouse in sleepy Leahampton and nose around to see if anyone or anything seems suspicious. He will be given a false identity, as a ‘Mr Meadowes’, the rest is up to him.
Grant has just finished explaining all this along with the practical details of trains and tickets, when Tuppence noisily slams the front door (having in fact never left the flat and overheard everything). Grant leaves and Tommy delivers his cover story i.e. he’s being sent to Scotland, they discuss it, Tommy packs etc, next day he kisses Tuppence goodbye and goes to get his train.
At the Sans Souci
Tommy stays a night in Scotland then, as planned, doubles back through England and arrives in Leahampton, makes his way to the Sans Souci guesthouse and checks in. Two important points:
First, although it’s taken a while to explain, the initial setup is over in half a dozen pages and the novel settles down to what you quickly realise is actually a very familiar format, that of the closed circle’ murder mystery’. According to Wikipedia the closed circle or closed circle of suspects:
refers to a situation in which for a given crime (usually a murder), there is a quickly established, limited number of suspects, each with credible means, motive, and opportunity. In other words, it is known that the criminal is one of the people present at or nearby the scene, and the crime could not have been committed by some outsider. The detective has to solve the crime, figuring out the criminal from this pool of suspects, rather than searching for an entirely unknown perpetrator.
My point is that the situation is almost identical: at the Sans Souci guesthouse are 7 or 8 guests, plus the landlady and her teenage daughter, and Tommy, Grant and the reader have all been led to believe that at least one of them is an enemy spy – but which one? As you might expect the next 200 pages are spent – exactly as in one of her murder mystery novels – slowly revealing the dodgy background and suspicious behaviour and odd remarks which eventually come to make all of them seem as if they might be the baddy.
Second point is this: Tommy has barely checked in before he discovers that Tuppence is also a guest at the Sans Souci!!! What? How? Why? She’s checked in under the false name of ‘Mrs Patricia Blenkensop’ with a pack of lies about being a widow with three adult children.
When he first sees her Tommy is thunderstruck but they both stick to their assumed identities. But the first chance they get alone together Tommy quickly interrogates her. The answer is simple: she eavesdropped on his conversation with Grant, overheard the whole plan, and refused to be left out. There you have Tuppence’s character in a nutshell: ballsy, defiant, independent etc. Tommy is secretly pleased and also proud of his indomitable wife.
Once Tommy’s got over the shock, the book settles down into the closed circle format I mentioned, with both Tommy and Tuppence separately getting to know and sound out all the other guests, observing and even following them without being noticed etc.
NB: Grant makes an arrangement that on certain afternoons he will position himself at the end of the Leahampton pier so he can rendezvous with either Tommy or Tuppence, who can brief him on their latest findings, while he reports back on any news from his end.
So who are the guests, what are their backstories, which ones are most suspicious?
Cast
- Tommy Beresford – the hero, masquerading as ‘Mr Meadowes’
- Prudence ‘Tuppence’ Beresford – the heroine, masquerading as ‘Mrs Patricia Blenkensop’
- Derek and Deborah – their grown-up children
- Mr Grant – British Intelligence
- Lord Easthampton aka Mr Carter – their former intelligence handler, now retired
At Sans Souci
Mrs Perenna – the landlady ‘rather untidy looking, a woman of middle-age with a large mop of fiercely curling black hair, some vaguely applied makeup and a determined smile showing a lot of very white teeth’ – it emerges that her first husband
Sheila Perenna – her daughter, tall, very violently anti-patriotic, thinks patriotism is stupid, thinks war is stupid – it emerges that all of this stems from the fact that her father was an Irish patriot, executed by the British:
‘His name was Patrick Maguire. He—he was a follower of Casement in the last war. He was shot as a traitor! All for nothing! For an idea—he worked himself up with those other Irishmen. Why couldn’t he just stay at home quietly and mind his own business? He’s a martyr to some people and a traitor to others. I think he was just—stupid!’
Tommy could hear the note of pent-up rebellion, coming out into the open.
He said: ‘So that’s the shadow you’ve grown up with?’
‘Shadow’s right. Mother changed her name. We lived in Spain for some years. She always says that my father was half a Spaniard. We always tell lies wherever we go. We’ve been all over the Continent. Finally we came here and started this place…’
Mrs O’Rourke – a very large woman with a thick Irish accent – ‘a terrifying mountain of a woman with beady eyes and a moustache gave him a beaming smile’
Major Bletchley – blustering patriot, no time for the damned Hun, ‘eyed Tommy appraisingly and made a stiff inclination of the head’
Commander Haycock – equally blustery patriotic old friend of Bletchley’s who takes him to visit Haycock’s house, ‘Smuggler’s Rest’ – the latter is immensely proud that it was, apparently, the base of a German spy during the First World War, chap named Hahn who Haycock helped expose
- Appledore – his butler, only had him a few months: tall
Mr von Deinim – German refugee from the Nazis, his father and brother arrested by the Nazis, works at a local chemical works where he is researching antidotes to poison gas: ‘a young man, very stiff, fair-haired and blue-eyed, got up and bowed’; deeply troubled at how he is treated, how everyone looks at him askance, so much so that he confides in Tuppence that he thinks about killing himself – but although Grant says his story checks out, Tuppence comes across him twice talking with a tall, anxious woman with a foreign accent; Deinem claims she was just asking for directions but Tuppence had watched them for a while and knew it was more than that
Miss Minton – ‘an elderly woman with a lot of beads, knitting with khaki wool, smiled and tittered’
Mrs Blenkensop – ‘more knitting—an untidy dark head which lifted from an absorbed contemplation of a Balaclava helmet’
Mr. and Mrs. Cayley – she fusses over him all the time
Mrs Sprot – a young mother with her ‘adorable’ 2-year-old daughter, Betty, who is just learning to talk – ‘the woman hasn’t got the brains of a hen’
Later characters
- the maid – eye witness
- Vanda Polonska – a Polish refugee
- Mrs Calfont – a thin-lipped, gimlet-eyed woman who had been dealing for some months with refugee relief
- Inspector Brassey – local copper
Timeline
The events of the book take place during the summer of 1940, and daily developments in Leahampton are correlated with the day-by-day events of the German invasion of France. Thus we hear about the German invasion, that the French are holding them but they are creating a ‘bulge’ in the line, then the breakthrough and race towards Paris. During Chapter 8 we hear about the start of the evacuation of Dunkirk (26 May 1940), the fall of Paris (5 June 1940), capitulation of the French government (22 June 1940).
Developments
Albert arrives
Fans will remember that in the first novel, Tommy and Tuppence are helped out by a young Cockney lad who works in the apartment block of the chief villainess. He’s easy to recruit because he’s an ardent reader of lurid crime fiction and so slips into the role of spy and fixer like a fish to water.
Well, he reappears in this novel, now, like the main characters, nearly 20 years older, married and the landlord of a pub in Kennington (The Duck and Dog). Being a working class character, Albert is the salt of the earth – like I’m always saying, Christie’s narratives are constructed from all manner of stock types and stereotypes. More to the point, Albert comes in handy as the novel hurtles towards its climax because he is a complete outsider, not staying as Sans Souci, not known by any of the other characters, and so can be brought in in the last act, to do important spying and message-taking jobs.
Betty is kidnapped
In a bizarre development, harmless Mrs Sprot’s little girl, Betty, is kidnapped. One evening the adults are playing cards, Mrs S realises it’s past Betty’s bedtime. When she goes to look for her in her room, any other room, and the garden, Betty is nowhere to be seen. Several of the guests spill out into the road to look for her and see a butcher’s boy on a bike chatting to a housemaid. The housemaid says yes, she saw Betty walking off hand in hand with a strange woman half an hour earlier.
Some of the guests suggest she calls the police but Mrs Sprot then reveals that in her bedroom she found a message tied round a stone and thrown in through the window. It is a crudely written ransom note, telling her not to go to the police or Betty will be killed.
The guests hold a council of war into which Mrs Perenna arrives. Having had her husband shot by the British authorities she is sceptical about the police and says they must act themselves to recover the child. Bletchley suggests they go over to see Commander Haycock. Haycock takes control of the situation and first of all drives them all to the nearest railway station where they quiz the staff and people waiting but no-one saw a woman with a small child.
Then a stranger (a Mr Robbins) comes up and says he’s overheard all the questioning and says that half an hour ago he saw a woman and child answering the description walking up his road, Ernes Cliff Road towards the fields ending in cliffs. So everyone piles into Haycock’s car which drives up Ernes Cliff Road. From here they spot the woman using binoculars and drive beyond the track onto the turf and drive fast towards the woman.
The woman, cornered, steps back towards the cliff and clutches Betty. They all agree her face is twisted with anger and hatred and she yells something but in a foreign language no-one understands. Haycock has a revolver but says he daren’t take a shot and risk injuring the girl. At that moment a shot rings out and the woman falls to the grass, shot through the head, releasing Betty.
What just happened? Who is this foreign woman? Why on earth did she kidnap Betty? Why throw a message wrapped round a stone through Mrs Sprot’s window? What was the purpose of the ransom note, to extort money, or had Mrs Sprot unwittingly overheard something? And how did mumsy feeble Mrs Sprot suddenly become a top marksman?
In the event there’s an inquest, where the coroner treats Mrs Sprot very kindly and gets the jury to return a verdict of justifiable homicide i.e. she is let off. The dead woman is identified as a Polish refugee, Vanda Polonska, verified by a Mrs Calfont, ‘a thin-lipped, gimlet-eyed woman who had been dealing for some months with refugee relief.’
The local senior policeman brought in on the case, Inspector Brassey, testifies that Polonska came over with married cousins of hers who have both subsequently been arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act for seeking work near a naval base with a view to spying on it.
But as to why she kidnapped a harmless two-year-old, no-one has a clue.
Tommy is abducted
Tommy takes up an invitation to go play a round of golf with Commander Haycock. His aim is to pump him for more information about Major Bletchley who he suspects of being just a bit too perfectly the British buffer. After a round and lots of amiable chatter, Haycock invites Tommy back to the Smuggler’s Rest for drinks.
Now bear in mind that Haycock makes a massive deal of telling all his guests that the place was designed and built by a man who turned out to be a German spy during the first war, and who Haycock endlessly boasts about spotting and turning in to the authorities.
Well a series of things happen: a) Tommy discovers that Haycock has a butler, a crisp, efficient rather German-looking man named Appledore, who he only took on a few months earlier, after he answered an ad. b) In a calculated gamble, Tommy slips into the conversation an innocent reference to the fact that when you apply for a passport, the form asks you ‘What is your name, answer N or M’. To his surprise (and rather like in a cartoon) the butler Appledore stumbles and drops his tray, spilling sticky creme de menthe on Tommy’s sleeve. d) Just for a second Haycock goes into an insensate fury of abuse of his servant. Moments later he has recovered and is more bluff. But for that moment Tommy thinks he sees the rage of the arrogant Prussian Junker against his servant, and suddenly realises maybe Haycock is N.
e) Finally, after washing his sleeve in the bathroom, upon coming out he steps on a bar of soap which has ended up on the floor and slips whilst trying to keep his balance, right across the floor of the bathroom and bangs into the side of the bath. This promptly opens to reveal a secret vault. Suddenly in a flash, Tommy puts all the evidence together and realises Haycock is the spymaster. All the bluster about revealing a German spy all those years ago was a clever double bluff.
Haycock tries to recover by telling Tommy in a matey way that he’s going to tell him something confidential, and then claiming that he himself is, in fact, a spy, doing dangerous undercover work for British Intelligence (he gives the agent number M142 BX) and makes Tommy swear to secrecy. Tommy (still masquerading under his fake name of Meadowes) does his best to come over as innocent and fascinated and wanting to know more. In reality he is panicking about whether Haycock will even let him leave the building. He makes it to the doorstep just as some fellow golfers walk past the end of the path and Tommy hails them, and so shakes Haycock’s hand, promises to keep his secret and makes his escape.
He chats with the golfers all the way to gate to Sans Souci where they part company. He is just congratulating himself on having escaped, and planning to tell all this to Grant next time they meet when he feels a crashing blow to his head and everything goes black. (Fans will remember that in the first novel Tommy is also knocked out in the first novel, ‘The Secret Adversary’, waking up to find himself in a cell.)
Deborah is incautious
For the first and only time the narrative cuts away to the workplace of Tommy and Tuppence’s grown-up daughter, Deborah Beresford. She is working in coding. She is puzzled because she’s gotten letters from Mummy telling her that she is staying with her Aunt Gracie in Cornwall. However a friend recently returned from Cornwall and told Deborah that her mother is not staying with her Aunt Gracie and never has.
Now none of this would matter if Deborah didn’t (very stupidly) decide to share this with the nice young man she works with, Tony Marsdon. Tony joshes Deborah that her mum’s probably run off with some fellow, which makes her cross. The Whole Point of the conversation is that Deborah then crosses a line when she rabbits on that someone the other day told her they’d seen her mother in Leahampton. And this makes Tony freeze.
Tony, his match held to a cigarette, paused suddenly and the match went out.
‘Leahampton?’ he said sharply. ‘Yes. Just the last place you could imagine Mother going off to. Nothing to do and all old Colonels and maiden ladies.’
‘Doesn’t sound a likely spot, certainly,’ said Tony.
He lit his cigarette and asked casually:
‘What did your mother do in the last war?’
Aha. Leahampton obviously means something to Tony so is he a) in British Intelligence and somehow knows about the Leahampton investigation, or b) much more ominously, is the implication that he is one of the many German fifth columnists, and realises someone’s onto them?
Later that day Deborah gets back to her digs and is irritated to find that someone has taken the photo of her mother (Tuppence) from the frame on her chest of drawers. Christie has to make her extremely dim not to put 2 and 2 together, but the reader does. Suddenly, we feel that Tuppence is in just as much danger as her husband.
Approaching climax
Just to up the ante, Chapter 11 (there are 16 chapters) opens back in Leahampton with Grant telling Tuppence that the fourth of the month coming is ‘the date fixed for the big attack on this country’ i.e. the invasion. So in the last five chapters we need to find out a) who the real N and M are, b) what their role is in helping to organise the German invasion, c) whether Tommy is still alive, d) whether Deborah’s indiscretion will get Tuppence into trouble.
As usual, I will not summarise the final chapters for the usual reasons which are 1) it gets more and more complicated and is only worth summarising if you do it thoroughly, 2) to avoid spoilers. You can read it yourself online.
What I will say is that the finale not only reveals who from the closed circle of suspects are the foreign agents N and M – but ends with a characteristically complicated and, as far as I could see, utterly unnecessary revelation that one of the characters listed above had adopted the identity of his friend who he was a dead ringer for but who committed suicide – none of which is really relevant to the main plot but is a very characteristic example of Christie way overcomplicating her ‘solutions’, and her particular addiction to people adopting false identities, impersonating others and acting a part.
In fact towards the end, Tuppence is approached by the young man Tony Marsdon who tells her she has to get dressed up in the disguise of a German infiltrator (which she does) in order to go and meet a dentist, who is in fact one of the main characters, himself masquerading as an English civilian and who himself knows that Tuppence has dressed up in disguise, and in fact knows that she is Tuppence Beresford masquerading as Mrs Blenkinsop who has then put on a load of makeup and prosthetics to look like the German infiltrator. Three levels of disguise confront three levels of disguise. It’s like a Shakespeare comedy on steroids.
Summary
Cartoon entertainment. Bubblegum lolz. Preposterous nonsense.
Compare and contrast with the infinitely more sophisticated spy stories of Somerset Maugham in Ashenden. Or the far more atmospheric spy stories of young Eric Ambler. Or the wartime adventure novels of Hammond Innes. Next to all these nearly contemporary novels, what distinguishes Christie’s work is the comedy – hers are essentially comic figures who get caught up in something which purports to be serious but never really feels like it.
Here’s the loveable Cockney character Albert reflecting on the war:
The state of affairs in general seemed to him quite wrong. The war was all wrong to begin with. ‘Those Germans,’ thought Albert gloomily and almost without rancour. ‘Heiling Hitler, and goose-stepping and overrunning the world and bombing and machine-gunning, and generally making pestilential nuisances of themselves. They’d got to be stopped, no two ways about it!’
Tuppence’s character
In my ignorance and before I started reading her novels, I thought Agatha Christie was all Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. I had no idea she created such a series of feisty, no-nonsense, independent women, among which is Tuppence Cowley – as demonstrated throughout the story: from her refusing to be locked out of the adventure, taking matters into her own hands, and volunteering for the dangerous mission at the end, keeping her cool when facing death and so on.
When her daughter’s boyfriend hesitates about whether to involve her in a risky venture, Tuppence quickly sets him straight:
She smiled kindly at him.
‘My dear boy, I know exactly how you feel. That it’s all very well for you and Deborah and the young generally to run risks, but that the mere middle-aged must be shielded. All complete nonsense, because if anyone is going to be liquidated it is much better it should be the middle-aged, who have had the best part of their lives. Anyway, stop looking upon me as that sacred object, Deborah’s mother, and just tell me what dangerous and unpleasant job there is for me to do.’
‘You know,’ said the young man with enthusiasm, ‘I think you’re splendid, simply splendid.’
‘Cut out the compliments,’ said Tuppence. I’m admiring myself a good deal, so there’s no need for you to chime in.’
(Chapter 13)
Credit
‘N or M?’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in November 1941.
Related links
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