With The Secret Adversary in 1922, Agatha Christie introduced her readers to two characters whom she would use again in four later novels: Partners in Crime (1929), N or M? (1941), By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968) and Postern of Fate (1974). It is as well, therefore, that Thomas Beresford and Prudence Cowley, known to their friends as Tommy and Tuppence, are only in their twenties in 1922, for this enabled their creator to allow them to age naturally. In their final adventure in 1974 they are presented as an elderly married couple with three grandchildren. When we first meet them, however, in The Secret Adversary, they are young, and just emerging from wartime activities, he as a Lieutenant in the army, who had been in action in France, Mesopotamia and Egypt, and she as a maid-of-all-work in an officers’ hospital in London. Tuppence is, perhaps, the author as Agatha Christie liked to fantasize herself, and Tommy is the kind of young man who appealed to the fantasy Agatha.
The relationship of the young couple is lightly romantic, though they refrain from confessing their feelings for each other until the last page of The Secret Adversary, and their style of speech is positively Wodehousian. ‘Tommy, old thing!’ and ‘Tuppence, old bean!’ they exclaim when they meet unexpectedly for the first time since the war, at the exit to the Dover Street tube station. (This is not a fictitious venue: there used to be a Dover Street station on the Piccadilly line.)
Set in 1920, in the autumn and winter of which year it was written, The Secret Adversary is dedicated ‘To ALL THOSE WHO LEAD MONOTONOUS LIVES in the hope that they may experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure’. If, in her first novel, Mrs Christie had set forth one of her two favourite subjects, the murder committed in (or at least involving the members of) an upperclass or upper-middleclass household, in her second she introduces her other favourite, the master criminal seeking to dominate the world. These two themes, domestic crime and global crime, continue to appear throughout her career, though the domestic crime novels not only greatly outnumber the thrillers involving international criminals or crime syndicates, but also are generally considered to be vastly superior to them.
The Secret Adversary begins with a prologue which takes place at 2 p.m. on the afternoon of 7 May 1915, in the Atlantic Ocean off the south coast of Ireland. The Lusitania has just been torpedoed by a German submarine, and is sinking fast. Women and children are lining up for the lifeboats, and a man approaches one of the women, an eighteen-year-old girl, to ask if she will take possession of some ‘vitally important papers’ which may make all the difference to the Allies in the war. The Lusitania settles with a more decided list to starboard as the girl goes forward to take her place in the lifeboat, and then suddenly we are in Mayfair, five years later, with Tommy and Tuppence blocking the exit to the Dover Street underground station, turning themselves into the Young Adventurers.
The Prologue is brief, graphic, and flings the reader in medias res. the sudden juxtaposition of a grey, grim Atlantic with the bright sunshine of post-war London and the cheerful optimism of the young adventurers, Tommy and Tuppence, is startlingly effective. In the interests of accuracy, however, it should be noted that Mrs Christie thought the Lusitania was sunk by two torpedoes. In fact, the German U-boat fired only one torpedo: those among the survivors who may have thought otherwise were misled by secondary explosions from the Lusitania’s boilers.
The story proper concerns the efforts of Tommy and Tuppence to trace the girl, Jane Finn, who survived the Lusitania disaster only to disappear immediately afterwards with those secret papers which, if they were made public now, months after the end of the war, would cause great embarrassment to the British Government. Mr Carter, a mysterious individual who is very high up in the British Secret Service, recruits the Young Adventurers to save the country. We are left in no doubt of Agatha Christie’s political leanings when Mr Carter points out to the Adventurers, Tommy and Tuppence, how vital it is that the documents should be retrieved and suppressed, for they could discredit a number of Conservative statesmen (–was there really a time when a government of any political persuasion contained a number of statesmen?–) and that would never do. ‘As a party cry for Labour it would be irresistible, and a Labour Government at this juncture,’ Mr Carter adds, ‘would, in my opinion, be a grave disability for British trade.’
During the course of their search, Tommy and Tuppence encounter a number of entertaining characters, some of them engaging but others distinctly unsavoury. They include Julius P. Hersheimmer, Jane Finn’s American millionaire cousin; Albert, the cockney liftboy in a Mayfair apartment block; and Sir James Peel Edgerton, a distinguished barrister, ‘the most celebrated KC in England’, a man likely to become a future Prime Minister. What links The Secret Adversary, and later Christie thrillers, with the murder mysteries on which the author’s reputation most securely rests is the fact that these and a number of other characters whom Tommy and Tuppence find themselves either collaborating with or pitted against are not only the clearcut ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ of the usual thriller, but are potential suspects as well. For, although Agatha Christie clearly differentiates the thriller from the murder mystery, she retains an element of the puzzle in her thrillers. The question ‘Who?’ is asked in the thrillers; it is simply that the question ‘How?’ becomes equally important.
In The Secret Adversary, the puzzle is the identity of the adversary. The Bolshevists, we are informed, are behind the labour unrest in the country, but there is a certain man who is ‘behind the Bolshevists’ (the italics are Mrs Christie’s). ‘Who is he?’ Mr Carter asks rhetorically:
‘We do not know. He is always spoken of by the unassuming title of “Mr Brown”. But one thing is certain, he is the master criminal of this age. He controls a marvellous organization. Most of the peace propaganda during the war was originated and financed by him. His spies are everywhere.
Tommy manages to eavesdrop upon a meeting of Mr Brown’s organization, at which various representatives report on their activities. A Sinn Feiner guarantees to produce, within a month, ‘such a reign of terror in Ireland as shall shake the British Empire to its foundations’. Others have infiltrated the trade unions: the report from the miners is thought to be most satisfactory, but ‘We must hold back the railways. There may be trouble with the ASE.’ It is important that the principal Labour leaders should have no inkling that they are being used by the Bolshevists. ‘They are honest men,’ says the representative from Moscow, ‘and that is their value to us.’
All good clean reactionary fun, and not without a certain absurd relevance to political life today! Those who take their politics solemnly, if anyone other than politicians is still able to do so, will probably reflect that The Secret Adversary gives an interestingly distorted picture of the social and industrial unrest which followed the First World War and which, during the years which saw the consolidation of the Russian revolution, was to lead to the General Strike in Great Britain, an event which is curiously anticipated in more than one of Agatha Christie’s early novels. But Mrs Christie is politically no further to the right in her thrillers than Ian Fleming in his distinctly less amusing James Bond novels of the nineteen-fifties and sixties.
The villain is unmasked at the end of The Secret Adversary and the threatened General Strike is averted or, as we now know, postponed. Inspector Japp has made, not an appearance, but a certain effect offstage, and the reader with a knowledge of nineteenth-century French opera will probably spot a certain clue which will leave those who suffer from amusia (the inability to comprehend or produce musical sounds) mystified.
The Secret Adversary was the first Agatha Christie novel to be made into a film. This did not happen until 1928, by which time Mrs Christie was being published in a number of foreign languages.