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The Secret Adversary
by Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie, The Secret Adversary (Dodd, Mead, 1922)
The good thing about buying a Kobo: it came pre-loaded with one hundred classic (read: out-of-copyright) books, most of which were either obscure titles by authors I knew, stuff I'd outright never heard of, or stuff “I mean to get around reading sometime in the future”. The bad part about buying a Kobo: they were all in some weird format that didn't make sense to anything but Kobo. So after a long night of erasing the weird proprietary format, pulling them all off Project Gutenberg, and reloading them, I was ready to get started. I just didn't know where to go. My clumsiness decided for me; I was reading something else, I no longer remember quite what, and I clicked on The Secret Adversary instead. So from then until I finished the books in front of it, it sat there taunting me on the “I'm currently reading” screen saying “1% finished.” Which it was going to keep doing short of my deleting it—again—and reloading it—again. At which point I decided it would be the first classic I tackled. (I'm quite glad I didn't accidentally click on the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I'm saving for when I have a terminal illness and need to bargain with Death.)
The first of Christie's five books to feature amateur sleuths Tommy (Beresford) and Tuppence (Crowley), The Secret Adversary begins with our hero and heroine, without a dime to their name, deciding on a lark to becomeadventurers. They are overheard, by coincidence, by someone in need of one. Which unleashes quite a powerful raft of coincidences, but I'm getting ahead of myself. In any case, they're hired to find a missing girl and the documents she was carrying, which are very secret and could do irreparable harm to the government were they to get out. (Of course, the bad guys are also looking for them.) The search involves a good deal of chasing, being chased, secret meetings with highly-placed government contacts, infiltrating communist cells, a stereotypical Texan with unlimited funds (the missing girl's cousin), and, of course, all kinds of romance.
Give Ms. Christie one thing—once the pedal hits the floor in this book, which is does roundabout Chapter Three, it doesn't let up until the very end. The pace is breakneck in the extreme, the excitement is always palpable, and the identity of “Mr. Brown”, the head of the conspiracy arrayed against our young folks, will keep you guessing until the (overly-dramatic, to be sure) Big Reveal. As a straight-up genre mystery, it's got all the hallmarks, and will keep you turning the pages.
On the other hand, it's an early novel, the second she ever published. It relies on the raft of coincidences I mentioned before to advance major plot points, the minor characters are stereotypes of the highest order, and one can detect a touch of paranoid ethnocentrism in a number of Christie's depictions of the members of the Bolshevik Conspiracy(TM) arrayed against Tommy and Tuppence (“He was fair, with a weak, unpleasant face, and Tommy put him down as being either a Russian or a Pole”, for example). Of course, whether Christie was caught up in the politics of the day or lampooning them is for the reader to decide, but I didn't really see anything to indicate the latter myself.
Genre fiction that doesn't aspire to be anything else, and that's not a bad thing, but ninety years later some of it may make you a bit uncomfortable; recommended, but proceed with caution. ** ½
The good thing about buying a Kobo: it came pre-loaded with one hundred classic (read: out-of-copyright) books, most of which were either obscure titles by authors I knew, stuff I'd outright never heard of, or stuff “I mean to get around reading sometime in the future”. The bad part about buying a Kobo: they were all in some weird format that didn't make sense to anything but Kobo. So after a long night of erasing the weird proprietary format, pulling them all off Project Gutenberg, and reloading them, I was ready to get started. I just didn't know where to go. My clumsiness decided for me; I was reading something else, I no longer remember quite what, and I clicked on The Secret Adversary instead. So from then until I finished the books in front of it, it sat there taunting me on the “I'm currently reading” screen saying “1% finished.” Which it was going to keep doing short of my deleting it—again—and reloading it—again. At which point I decided it would be the first classic I tackled. (I'm quite glad I didn't accidentally click on the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I'm saving for when I have a terminal illness and need to bargain with Death.)
The first of Christie's five books to feature amateur sleuths Tommy (Beresford) and Tuppence (Crowley), The Secret Adversary begins with our hero and heroine, without a dime to their name, deciding on a lark to becomeadventurers. They are overheard, by coincidence, by someone in need of one. Which unleashes quite a powerful raft of coincidences, but I'm getting ahead of myself. In any case, they're hired to find a missing girl and the documents she was carrying, which are very secret and could do irreparable harm to the government were they to get out. (Of course, the bad guys are also looking for them.) The search involves a good deal of chasing, being chased, secret meetings with highly-placed government contacts, infiltrating communist cells, a stereotypical Texan with unlimited funds (the missing girl's cousin), and, of course, all kinds of romance.
Give Ms. Christie one thing—once the pedal hits the floor in this book, which is does roundabout Chapter Three, it doesn't let up until the very end. The pace is breakneck in the extreme, the excitement is always palpable, and the identity of “Mr. Brown”, the head of the conspiracy arrayed against our young folks, will keep you guessing until the (overly-dramatic, to be sure) Big Reveal. As a straight-up genre mystery, it's got all the hallmarks, and will keep you turning the pages.
On the other hand, it's an early novel, the second she ever published. It relies on the raft of coincidences I mentioned before to advance major plot points, the minor characters are stereotypes of the highest order, and one can detect a touch of paranoid ethnocentrism in a number of Christie's depictions of the members of the Bolshevik Conspiracy(TM) arrayed against Tommy and Tuppence (“He was fair, with a weak, unpleasant face, and Tommy put him down as being either a Russian or a Pole”, for example). Of course, whether Christie was caught up in the politics of the day or lampooning them is for the reader to decide, but I didn't really see anything to indicate the latter myself.
Genre fiction that doesn't aspire to be anything else, and that's not a bad thing, but ninety years later some of it may make you a bit uncomfortable; recommended, but proceed with caution. ** ½