The volume entitled The Sunningdale Mystery, published by Collins in 1929 as a 6d paperback, is in fact merely Chapters 11 to 22 of Partners in Crime.
Several of the stories in Partners in Crime were seen as part of a weekly Tommy and Tuppence series on London Weekend TV in 1993.
As no attempt has previously been made by writers on Agatha Christie to identify all of the crime writers parodied in Partners in Crime, the following table which lists them all may be of interest:
| Chapter | Detective(s) impersonated | Author (and some titles) |
| 3 | Dr John Thorndyke | Richard Austin Freeman (1862–1943): The Cat’s Eye; Dr Thorndyke Intervenes |
| 5 | the brothers Desmond and Major Okewood (there is a passing reference to Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond stories) | Valentine Williams (1883–1946), writing as Douglas Valentine. The Oakwood brothers appear in The Secret Hand, also entitled Okewood of the Secret Service |
| 7 | (Timothy) McCarty and Riordan | Isabel Ostrander (1885–1924). McCarty and Riordan appear in McCarty Incog. |
| 9 | Sherlock Holmes | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930); The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; His Last Bow; The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes |
| 10 | Thornley Colton | Clinton H. Stagg. Thornley Colton is the hero of Thornley Colton, Blind Detective |
| 11 | Father Brown | G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936): The Innocence of Father Brown; The Secret of Father Brown; The Scandal of Father Brown |
| 13 | The Busies | Edgar Wallace (1875–1932): The Clue of the Twisted Candle; The Ringer |
| 15 | The Old Man in the Corner | Baroness Orczy (1865–1947): The Case of Miss Elliott; The Old Man in the Corner, Unravelled Knots |
| 17 | Inspector Hanaud | A. E. W. Mason (1865–1948): At the Villa Rose; The House of the Arrow |
| 19 | Inspector French | Freeman Wills Crofts (1879–1957): Inspector French’s Greatest Case; Tragedy in the Hollow |
| 20 | Roger Sheringham | Anthony Berkeley: The Wychford Poisoning Case; Top Story Murder, Murder in the Basement |
| 22 | Reggie Fortune | H. C. Bailey (1878–1961): Mr Fortune’s Practice; Mr Fortune Objects |
| 23 Hercule Poirot | Agatha Christie (1890–1976): The Mysterious Affair at Styles; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd |
The Murder at the Vicarage MISS MARPLE (1930)
In the autumn of 1929, Agatha Christie decided to take a holiday alone. Rosalind was at school, and would not be at home until the Christmas holidays, so Agatha planned a visit to the West Indies and made all the necessary arrangements through Thomas Cook’s. Two days before she was to leave, a married couple at a dinner party spoke to her of the Middle East, where they had been stationed, and of the fascination of Baghdad. When they mentioned that you could travel most of the way there on the Orient Express, Agatha became extremely interested, for she had always wanted to travel on the famous international train which went from Calais to Istanbul. And when she realized that, from Baghdad, she would be able to visit the excavations at Ur, the biblical Ur of the Chaldees, the matter was decided. The following morning she rushed to Cook’s, cancelled her West Indian arrangements and made reservations on the Orient Express to Istanbul, and further on to Damascus and Baghdad.
The journey on the Orient Express, through France, Switzerland, Italy and the Balkans, was all that she had hoped it would be. After an overnight stay in old Stamboul, Mrs Christie crossed the Bosphorus into Asia and continued her train journey through Asiatic Turkey, entering Syria at Aleppo, and continuing south to Damascus. She spent three days in Damascus at the Orient Palace Hotel, a magnificent edifice with large marble halls but extremely poor electric light, and then set off into the desert by bus (the Nairn Line fleet of buses was operated by two Australian brothers, Gerry and Norman Nairn). After a forty-eight-hour journey which she found both fascinating and rather sinister because of the complete absence of landmarks of any kind in the desert, she finally reached her destination, the ancient city of Baghdad, capital of modern Iraq and of old Mesopotamia.
One of the first things Agatha did was arrange to visit the excavations at Ur, about halfway between Baghdad and the head of the Persian Gulf, where Leonard Woolley was in charge of the joint British Museum and Museum of the University of Pennsylvania Expedition. As Woolley’s wife Katharine, a formidable lady, was a Christie fan and had just finished reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd with great enjoyment, the author was accorded special treatment and was not only allowed to remain with the digging team but was invited to join them again the following season. Having fallen in love with the beauty of Ur, and the excitement of excavating the past, Mrs Christie enthusiastically agreed to return. Meanwhile, she enjoyed the rest of her stay in Baghdad until, in November, it was time to go back to England. In March of the following year, 1930, travelling from Rome to Beirut by sea, she made her way back to Baghdad and to Ur.
This time, Agatha Christie met Woolley’s assistant, Max Mallowan, who had been absent with appendicitis on her first visit. Of mixed Austrian and French parentage, his father being an Austrian who had emigrated to England, Mallowan was a twenty-six-year-old archaeologist who had been Woolley’s assistant at Ur since coming down from Oxford five years previously. At the conclusion of Agatha’s visit, the imperious Katherine Woolley ordered young Mallowan to take their distinguished guest on a round trip to Baghdad and to show her something of the desert before escorting her home on the Orient Express. They enjoyed each other’s company and, by the time they arrived back in England, Mallowan had decided to ask Mrs Christie to marry him.
When he proposed to her, she was taken completely by surprise. They had become close friends, but that was all, and she was fourteen years older than he, she told him. Yes, he knew that, and he had always wanted to marry an older woman. She agreed to think about it, and although she had grave doubts as to the wisdom of marrying again, let alone marrying a man so much younger than herself, she did like him and they had so much in common. She consulted her daughter, Rosalind, who gave her unqualified approval. At the end of the summer, Agatha Christie said yes, and on 11 September 1930, after she returned from a holiday in the Hebrides, they were married in the small chapel of St Columba’s Church in Edinburgh.
The Orient Express took the newly married couple on the first stage of their honeymoon to Venice, whence they made their way to Dubrovnik and Split and then down the Dalmatian coast and along the coast of Greece to Patras in a small Serbian cargo boat. After a tour of Greece with a few idyllic days at Delphi, they parted in Athens, Max to rejoin the dig at Ur, and Agatha to return to London, suffering from an especially violent form of Middle Eastern stomach upset or possibly, as diagnosed by the Greek doctor she consulted, ptomaine poisoning.
In her autobiography, Agatha Christie writes that Murder at the Vicarage was published in 1930, but that she cannot remember where, when or how she wrote it, or even what suggested