The final Tommy & Tuppence novel.
Tommy and Tuppence Beresford have just become the proud owners of an old house in an English village. Along with the property, they have inherited some worthless bric-a-brac, including a collection of antique books. While rustling through a copy of The Black Arrow, Tuppence comes upon a series of apparently random underlinings.
However, when she writes down the letters, they spell out a very disturbing message:
M a r y – J o r d a n – d i d – n o t – d i e – n a t u r a l l y…

I think this was a ‘strictly for the fans’ novel. Most of its charm came from answering “Whatever happened to…” questions about the Tommy and Tuppence whom we met in previous books. 

It seemed to me that Christie was having fun saying farewell to two of her favourite characters.The story is slight, moves slowly and is mostly powered by humour, much of which is springs from how Tommy and Tuppence, now an older married couple with grown children and young grandchildren, relate to one another.

The banter between Tommy and Tuppence has evolved from the lively but brittle exchanges they had in ‘The Secret Adversary‘ fifty years earlier, to gentle fencing in which Tuppence is clearly dominant. Tuppence is still energetically curious. Tommy wants nothing more than a quiet life in the country. Tuppence pulls Tommy along in her wake, where he flips between admiring her behaviour and worrying about its consequences.

‘Postern Of Fate‘ reads more like a radio play than a novel. Almost everything is done as dialogue – including all of the exposition. There is very little description of places. The chapter headings read like the title cards between scenes of a silent movie. This means that there is no authorial voice guiding the reader and no coherent point of view. It’s a little like eavesdropping.

Nothing very thrilling happens in the thriller (although there are a couple of attempts on Tuppence’s life). The clues are revealed slowly, laboriously and with an annoying amount of repetition. By the time Tuppence figures it out, I think most readers will be going ‘How can it have taken her this long to make that connection?’ The ending involves clumsy exposition via an unexciting formal briefing, and the solution devolved into another of Christie’s paranoid global conspiracy theories. 

Even so, I enjoyed visiting with Tommy and Tuppence one last time.