Equally she does not feel bad lying, unlike Tommy, saying ‘I don’t mind lying in the least. Perhaps this is especially the case for Tuppence who very much gets into her alias role, which incidentally also enables her to release some of her pent up anxieties about her children. Very early on in the book Christie emphasises the benefits to mental health through having a proper purpose and work, during wartime conditions.

Despite the dangers I would say this mission is more of an escape for Tommy and Tuppence than serious work. I think one of the things this re-read has brought out for me is how unlike a typical war novel this book is in some respects. But who will N and M eventually turn out to be? (And no one of them is not the toddler…) Yet by the end of Chapter 1 Tommy is in for a surprise when he finds that one of the other guests at San Souci, a Mrs Blenkensop, seems awfully familiar… Tommy and Tuppence both set to work independently, yet their choices for possible 5 th columnists seem fairly limited: a young mother and her toddler, a hostess with something to hide and her rebellious daughter, an elderly spinster, a retired military man, a hypochondriac and his overly-devote wife and a German refugee – a collection of people who seem so obviously innocent that the reader must treat them with extreme suspicion and of people who seem so obviously guilty, that the reader can’t help but see them as red herrings. Of course Tuppence is not to be involved and Tommy is to give her a cover story. This is less farfetched than it sounds, as Tommy is working on leads another operative has been investigating, before their untimely and very deliberate death. Two key operatives named N and M are Tommy’s targets.

Yet things soon change for Tommy when a man from British Intelligence asks him to go down to Leahampton, a seaside resort in particular to go and stay at a guest house called San Souci, in order to identify German and British 5 th Columnists. Tuppence too has been refused nursing work and both are feeling fairly cheesed off that they are considered unfit for work, purely on the grounds of them being in their late 40s. N or M? (1941), the third Tommy and Tuppence Beresford novel, is not Christie’s best book by any means but one I have always been fond of, which made it all the more galling when this title was unfortunately massacred in its 2015 TV adaptation.īut on with the book itself, which begins with Tommy having been turned down for more war work. Sayers in The Wimsey Papers, Christie does not have Poirot or Miss Marple involved in war work or expressing their views on current events. During WW2 Christie’s work mostly does not directly refer to the conflict that was going on, except today’s read which is the exception.

Tommy and tuppence n or m