She was still writing to great acclaim until her death, and her books have now sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in over 100 foreign languages. Partners in Crime is available in all formats and you can buy a copy here.īorn in Torquay in 1890, Agatha Christie began writing during the First World War and wrote over 100 novels, plays and short story collections. Part of the reason I wanted to take part in this challenge was to widen the scope of my Christie reading, and this book has certainly done that. I can’t tell you that Tommy and Tuppence will overtake Marple or Poirot in my affections but I loved reading something new and a little more frivolous and, as I had never read any of Christie’s short stories before, this was an interesting departure. I loved this insight into Christie’s sense of humour, she obviously didn’t take herself too seriously! The stories are all quite entertaining and devious, and I really enjoyed the peep into how the young and monied folk lived in the 1920s. Tommy and Tuppence are always teasing each other, and they like to investigate each crime in the manner of a famous literary detective such as Sherlock Holmes or even, in one case, Hercule Poirot. The stories are quite light-hearted in tone compared to Christie’s full length novels.
The stories are all loosely linked via the ongoing challenge to Tommy and Tuppence of thwarting some international espionage, but each has their own individual crime or puzzle to solve and is self-contained. You’ll see the clever link here to the challenge theme this month – blunt object – as the detective agency itself is a blunt object, as well as one of the stories in the collection featuring murder by this method. Partners in Crime is actually a collection of short stories featuring Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, a young married couple who, by a twist of fate, end up taking over operation of Blunt’s International Detective Agency.
I have never come across a story featuring these two before, so I was keen to dive in. (If you would like more details of the Read Christie challenge, you can find them in last month’s post here.) For this challenge, the book suggested by the organisers was Partners in Crime, featuring Tommy and Tuppence. The second book in the #ReadChristie2023 challenge, to be read in February, was to feature a method of murder – in this case, a Blunt Object. Tommy and Tuppence Beresford were restless for adventure, so when they were asked to take over Blunt’s International Detective Agency, they leapt at the chance.Īfter their triumphant recovery of a pink pearl, intriguing cases kept on coming their way: a stabbing on Sunningdale golf course cryptic messages in the personal columns of newspapers and even a box of poisoned chocolates.
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