N or M?: A Tommy and Tuppence Mystery

"In a way. Christie was incredibly prolific during the Second World War. She always maintained at least a book a year over her whole career, but during the late 1930s, early 1940s, she was writing two and sometimes three. She wrote what she intended to be the last Poirot and the last Marple mysteries in the early 1940s, and then they were put away in a bank vault, as an insurance policy ‘in case of my death.’ She signed over the copyright—the Poirot to her husband and the Marple to her daughter. The idea was that if she were to be killed, their posthumous publication would make a lot of money and that would see that her loved ones would be okay. So in addition to the books that she actually published, she was writing extra ones, in case of emergency. As it happened, she lived into the 1970s, and the books weren’t published until then. But, yes, N or M? is the only book she wrote during the war that’s actually about the war. She completely ignores it in all of her other ones. She comes back to it, from the later 1940s, but not at the time. N or M? is a Tommy and Tuppence novel, who are recurring characters for her but far less well known than Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter They’re a married couple, and they’re interesting because they actually age through the books. Poirot never ages. But the first time we meet Tommy and Tuppence in The Secret Adversary in 1922, they are young, they’re not married, they come to fall in love over the course of the case that they solve. And then the next time, in Partners in Crime , they’re married, they’re about to have a child. It then jumps forward, and in N or M? that child is much older, and they’re feeling quite bored. They used to be involved in espionage, and now there’s a war and no one seems to want them. Then they are recruited, or rather, Tommy is recruited to help find a mole in the British intelligence services. And Tuppence decides that she’s not being left behind, so she gets dressed up incognito, goes to join him, and they pursue this case together. It is all about finding fifth columnists. It was the one time that Christie tried to write about the war while it was happening, and she does it in a more lighthearted tone. All the Tommy and Tuppence books are that way. One interesting thing about this book is that there’s a character in it called Major Bletchley, who freaked out the British intelligence service . They wondered whether she somehow knew what was going on at Bletchley Park, since she was very good friends with someone who was actually working there, a Cambridge mathematician called Dilly Knox, who was one of the leading codebreakers. They thought he must have said something, but when she was asked why she’d named this character in her book Major Bletchley, she said, ‘Well, I was once on a train from Oxford to London and broke down and I was stuck in Bletchley station. It was such an inconvenience, it was awful, I hated it. So I gave this really boring character the name Bletchley.” She had no idea. It was a coincidence, but it evidently bothered them very much. That’s definitely true. I think a question that lots of these writers were trying to solve was that, up to this point, the classic whodunnit had been domestic, albeit sometimes in the aristocratic, country house sense. But wartime enforced a much more communal way of living. Everyone had to do the blackout, or else it wasn’t going to work, that kind of thing. It was a bit harder to send a load of characters off to a remote country house and just keep them there. There was a sense that you had to be part of the world."