This is the third Agatha Christie novel I’ve read this year, which pretty much constitutes a binge for me. I’ve really been enjoying them, though, so I see no reason to stop. N OR M? (1941) is the second novel and third book overall in the Tommy and Tuppence series. There’s a collection of short stories, PARTNERS IN CRIME, which I haven’t read yet, between this novel and the first one, THE SECRET ADVERSARY (1927). I read THE SECRET ADVERSARY a little more than ten years ago and enjoyed it. Christie took a while to get back to Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, and so did I.
There’s a significant time jump between N OR M? and the previous novel. In THE
SECRET ADVERSARY, Tommy and Tuppence weren’t married yet and were still young,
adventurous, and romantic. In this novel, they’re still romantic and
adventurous, but they’re middle-aged, the parents of twin grown-up children.
Their son is a pilot and their daughter is a codebreaker. Tommy and Tuppence
both wish there was something they could do to aid the war effort, too, as there’s
a definite feeling that the Nazis will sweep through Europe and invade England
next.
Enter an associate of the intelligence chief Tommy and Tuppence worked for in THE
SECRET ADVERSARY. He has an undercover job for Tommy: ferreting out the identity
of two German agents who are coordinating Fifth Column activities in England.
Their code names are N and M, hence the title. The job involves Tommy being a
guest at a boarding house on the English coast because the German spies are suspected of staying there, too. Tuppence isn’t asked to be part of the
operation, but seriously, no one believes that’s going to stop her, do they?
She goes undercover as well to help Tommy with his spy hunt.
From there things fly along at a fairly breakneck pace in Christie’s very
smooth prose. A lot happens in the normally sedate English countryside, including
a kidnapping and a shooting. Plenty of banter spices things up as Christie
slips in clues here and there, but this is less of a formal mystery and more of
a thriller. And a very entertaining one, at that, with some genuinely
suspenseful scenes.
Now, did I figure out the mystery? Well, I knew who one of the German spies was
almost right away, and for the same reasons that Tuppence lays out at the end
of the book when everything is explained. There were several plot elements that
had me thinking, “Well, that’s going to be important later on,” as soon as they
were introduced, and I was right. I’d say that the identity of the other German
spy can’t really be deduced from any information Christie gives the reader. You
might guess who it is, but you couldn’t figure it out.
Or maybe that’s just me. I still had a lot of fun reading N OR M? even though
it was predictable in some respects. Tommy and Tuppence are very likable
sleuths. I need to read that short story collection, and I think there are two
more novels in which they appear. I’ll get to them, hopefully sooner than ten
years from now.
Below are some of the many, many reprints of this novel.
1 comment:
My wife was always a bigger Tommy & Tuppence fan than I was. There is another, later book when they're older - BY THE PRICKING OF MY THUMBS - and one when they are "old" (though not by my current standards) - POSTERN OF FATE.
As I remember it, PARTNERS IN CRIME has them trying to solve their cases using the methods of other fictional detectives popular at the time (the 1920s), like R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke, Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown, among others.
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