I enjoyed my meetings with Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence both as bright young things looking for adventure in ‘The Secret Adversary’ (1922) and as an older married couple working for the security service tracking down spies at the English seaside early in the Second World War in ’N or M?’ (1941).

So I set up a Buddy Read ‘Partners In Crime’ during May with other Agatha Christie fans.

The twelve stories in the collection are light-hearted tales that Agatha Christie wrote both to revisit her boisterous young detecting couple and to parody detective stories that were popular in the 1920s.

To me, the stories seemed to be a sort of Improv game that Christie was playing for her own amusement. I imagined her having a fine time effortlessly spinning off plot idea after plot idea and dressing them ironically in the costumes of another writer’s characters. How exhilarating it must have been to have an imagination so fertile. 

Unfortunately, they are less fun to read than they probably were to write. 

For the most part, they read more like sketches than short stories and they’re sketches that depend for their full effect on knowledge of other Golden Age Crime writers that I don’t have. I feel that I’m watching ‘Spitting Image’ without knowing the celebrities that puppets are ridiculing.

My enjoyment of the stories went up when I was familiar with the fictional detective(s) being mimicked but they are so slight that, when I’m ignorant of the reference points, it’s like biting into a meringue.

That said, the chemistry between Tommy and Tuppence still worked and I enjoyed seeing Christie being so playful in her writing.

I think this is a collection that will be enjoyed most by Christie fans with a broad knowledge of Golden Age Mystery writers.

If you’d like to know more about the individual stories, I’ve given my opinion of each of them on the next page.