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