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finesilkflower 's review for:
Partners in Crime
by Agatha Christie
Married retired spies Tommy and Tuppence agree to go back undercover one more time as mild-mannered proprietors of a small-time detective agency, for some obscure MI-5 reason. The book is structured as a series of short mysteries as Tommy and Tuppence go into detective mode to investigate, often adopting the methods of various famous book detectives, including Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and a bunch of others I don't know, to comical effect.
I get why people like Tommy and Tuppence; it's refreshing to read a story from this (or any) era with married characters who are fun, and who genuinely like each other, and whose marriage isn't in trouble, and where the woman gets to do things, and the husband doesn't try to stop her.
I just find their antics tiresome. I think it's a tone problem. Mystery/comedy doesn't really work for me as a genre because murder is inherently serious. Agatha Christie books are never really about the seriousness/horror of murder so much as they use murder as a device to create a clever/twisty/cerebral puzzle around, but at least Poirot and Miss Marple can take their crimes seriously, and show occasional depth of feeling.
Any issues with the tone and characters would have been irrelevant if the mysteries were good, but these aren't really. They feel very phoned-in.
I get why people like Tommy and Tuppence; it's refreshing to read a story from this (or any) era with married characters who are fun, and who genuinely like each other, and whose marriage isn't in trouble, and where the woman gets to do things, and the husband doesn't try to stop her.
I just find their antics tiresome. I think it's a tone problem. Mystery/comedy doesn't really work for me as a genre because murder is inherently serious. Agatha Christie books are never really about the seriousness/horror of murder so much as they use murder as a device to create a clever/twisty/cerebral puzzle around, but at least Poirot and Miss Marple can take their crimes seriously, and show occasional depth of feeling.
Any issues with the tone and characters would have been irrelevant if the mysteries were good, but these aren't really. They feel very phoned-in.