After Tuppence is accosted by the mysterious Mr Whittington, whose fishy offer of a job on the continent she immediately rejects, the duo suspect that something is up. Finding themselves to be not only unemployed but also unemployable, they decide to advertise their services as adventurers for hire. Over a cup of tea and a plate of toast, they discuss the dreariness of civilian life and lament the impossibility of getting a job now that the recently-ended war has flooded the market with potential employees, whilst also having robbed most of the conscripted men and women of England of the chance to gain experience and training. In this particular novel, childhood friends Thomas ‘Tommy’ Beresford and Prudence ‘Tuppence’ Cowley unexpectedly run into each other again at Dover Street tube station. If this describes Christie’s archetypal mystery-plot, then her thriller plots tend to err on the more colourful and exotic – details which lend colour to the central puzzle in her mystery stories become foregrounded in these narratives of spies, master-criminals and chases. I suspect what people mean when they make the distinction is that the story doesn’t involve the usual enclosed setting where one character is bumped off and a group of suspects is lined up to be questioned by the novel’s resident detective.

I’ve always found the absolute distinction that people make between Christie’s ‘thrillers’ and her ‘mysteries’ to be an odd one, since there’s usually some mystery lurking at the heart of her thrillers and (admittedly less often) some element of the thriller lurking at the hear of her mysteries. This is the first of Agatha Christie’s ‘thrillers’. Note: contains spoilers for this novel and for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The ABC Murders.

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