Agatha Christie gets a lot of flack for the creation of Tommy and Tuppence, two young stand-ins for herself and her husband Archie (get it, Archie and Agatha? Alliteration?). Tommy was a wounded warrior in WWI, Tuppence was a nurse, which is basically the Christie life story. I suppose critics think T&T to be indulgent, or just silly, and no doubt they are. But they are a relief from dealing with Hercule Poirot and especially Hastings. Tommy is the "dumb one," but he's just dumb enough to solve the mystery. Tuppence is the intuitive one, but she's not so intuitive we can't follow her train of thought.
The story kicks off with the two meeting after the war, broke and a little depressed, deciding to form a "Young Adventurers" agency, no "unreasonable offer refused." Detecting! It's a lark! They get caught up in international intrigue when Tuppence is declined their first case because she falsely gives herself the name "Jane Finn," a name Tommy overheard at a restaurant and considers supremely ridiculous (really? THIS is a ridiculous name? Compared to, I dunno, Tuppence?). I suppose the ridiculousness of "Jane Finn" doesn't translate to today.
Curious, T&T advertise for more information about "Jane Finn" in "the papers." They are then contacted by a man from a British intelligence agency and an American millionaire (a jewish guy whose dad made a killing in the steel industry, and of whom Tommy ignorantly remarks on his "unfortunate ancestry." Apparently Christie was kind of a bigtime anti-semite, according to a recollection from a book in a letter to the New Yorker that I can't link to) who is Finn's cousin. Finn was on the Lusitania, and was apparently asked to take a packet from an American that contained some sort of treaty that now, five years later, will have major negative impacts on the British government. Which is why they suspect that a certain "Mr. Brown," head of some kind of Commie group, wants it. So he can bring down the government with an overly-kind-to-Germany treaty that was never enacted. How touchy were people back then? "You tried to avoid war with Germany? That's it! I'm going communist!"
And yes, Christie hates commies.
I suppose what is so interesting about this book, besides the fact that T&T get a millionaire to give them money to do detective work that they've never done in their life, is that in spite of the fact that the government is on the precipice of failure, the parlor aspect of this thriller keeps it claustrophobic. It's like Christie has this sense of space that is collapsed. Very little happens outdoors, and when the treaty is apparently hidden outside it is in a tiny crevice that is easily identified along an easily-found path. T&T are always meeting the millionaire at the Ritz, eating in a deli called the Picadilly, and going to Marguerite Vandemeyer's apartment. Even a co-conspirator of T&T's, a little lift boy named Albert, works in an elevator. Even when Tuppence is shepherding Jane Finn to safety along a street, when Christie is finally dealing with a kind of open space, it is supposed to be menacing because they are surrounded by bolshevists.
When Mr. Brown is finally revealed, yeah, it's a surprise. I got fooled, I'll admit it.
But I can't really read a 300-page book waiting for the surprise ending. I need a little more than that, and the scope is both claustrophobic and yet not much psychologically is going on. Christie has been given a lot of benefit of the doubt for knowing "how people work" with their murderous impulses in a quiet setting. But she's a racist, an anti-semite, her writing depends on caricatures and her "good" people are kind of boring. Maybe pessimists like what they see, but I'm wondering if I'll make it through another few books without giving up.
