Partners in Crime by Agatha Christie
Partners in Crime collects the adventures of Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, a married couple recruited by their old spymaster Mr. Carter to run the International Detective Agency — a Bloomsbury bureau seized from a jailed crook, Theodore Blunt, under whose name they now operate as a front for British intelligence. Bored with prosperous domesticity, Tuppence longs for excitement, and Carter obliges: the agency is to watch for coded blue Russian letters signed with the number 16, evidence of a foreign espionage ring, while ostensibly taking on ordinary detective work. Each subsequent chapter is a self-contained case in which Tommy, aided by his "highly trained staff" of Tuppence and the office boy Albert, consciously imitates the methods of a different famous fictional detective — Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Thorndyke, the Old Man in the Corner, McCarty, Father Brown, Reggie Fortune, Hanaud, and others — while Tuppence plays his foil or assistant. The mysteries range widely: a runaway hat-shop girl staged to spur a proposal; a stolen pink pearl traced to a kleptomaniac lady's French maid; a fake Scotland Yard inspector who chloroforms and interrogates Tommy over the coded letters, foiled by a real ambush; a missing explorer's fiancée who has secretly gone to a nursing home to slim down; a golf-club murder solved by deducing a disguised killer switching identities via a distinctive blue coat; a poisoned-chocolates plot against an heiress that escalates to fatal sandwiches at a country house. Running through the individual puzzles is the ongoing thread of the international counterfeiting and espionage ring ("the Crackler" and associates), which the Beresfords infiltrate through society gambling circles, and the couple's own domestic banter — their competitive one-upmanship, mutual teasing about vanity and detective technique, and evident, easy affection — which frames and lightens the criminal plots throughout.
By Agatha Christie · First published 1929 · Genre: Mystery, Detective Fiction, Crime Fiction · 17 chapters
Contents
- I: a Fairy in the Flat
- Ii: a Pot of Tea
- Iii: the Affair of the Pink Pearl
- Iv: the Adventure of the Sinister Stranger
- V: Finessing the King
- Vi: the Gentleman Dressed in Newspaper
- Vii: the Case of the Missing Lady
- Viii: Blindman's Buff
- Ix: the Man in the Mist
- X: the Crackler
- Xi: the Sunningdale Mystery
- Xii: the House of Lurking Death
- Xiii: the Unbreakable Alibi
- Xiv: the Clergyman's Daughter
- Xv: the Red House
- Xvi: the Ambassador's Boots
- The Man who was no. 16