N OR M?
UK publication: 1941 (Collins)
US publication: 1941 (Dodd, Mead)
Detective: Tommy & Tuppence Beresford
Genre: Novel
Plot summary and comments: The first Christie novel to be set in the Second World War. Tommy and Tuppence Beresford now have a grownup son and daughter, and are too old for the war effort; finally, to their delight, they are informally asked by the Secret Service to assist in the rounding up of a group of Fifth Columnists. Their old errandboy, Albert, now a pub owner, agrees to help them again, and they discover the identity of the chief spy and foil the enemy plans. Perhaps the least convincing of the Beresfords' adventures; nevertheless, easy to read.
Courtesey of: http://stout.physics.ucla.edu/%7eyoder/mystery/christie.html
::READERS REVIEWS::
i
have been borrowing a couple of her books from the library after a long
hiatus of 5-6 years. n or m is my first introduction to tommy and tuppence,
and i must say they are a light-hearted, action-oriented departure from
christie's other investigators, who give the impression of spending a
lot of time in situ, whether at the murder scenes or comtemplating the
case. christie veers from teh pack in her stubborn regard for the facts
and teh circumstances; i have never done any professional spying, but
i imagine if i did that i could take a few hints from her detailed analysis
of how her characters think and act. so many detectives in detective novels
strike you as so ordinary - some are not even very smart - but in this
book you see the true complexity of wartime counter-espionage come to
life, all the more frightening because it lurks beneath a veneer of everyday
monotony. i love how she injects obscure words now and then...reminds
you of a time when people didn't just use er..awesome as an umbrella expression
for pleasure!
During
World War II, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford follow an obscure clue to a
small English seaside town where a Nazi mastermind is recruiting Englishmen
to help their cause. But who at the hotel is the mastermind? When a young
child is kidnapped, Tommy and Tuppence believe they're on the right track,
but are they? This riveting thriller is Christie at her best. It's a noteworthy
for the political slant she includes, because that's not terribly common
for her books. It constantly amazes me the amount of pertinent details
Christie includes for the readers. Some are red herrings, and some are
decisive. Agatha Christie was certainly the best.
Normally
Agatha Christie chooses to focus on the mysteries and not really concentrate
on political and social events of that period; consequently her characters
sometimes seem to be living in a vaccuum, removed from all that is happening
around them. What makes "N or M?" unusual is that Christie chose
to focus on WWII and what was happening in England at that time. Tommy
and Tuppence who are living quietly in London suddenly find their routine
interrupted when Tommy is called away on a secret assignment to try and
find Hitler's most dangerous agent who has infiltrated England in advance
of a planned attack by the Nazis. Of course, Tuppence who refuses to be
left out of anything, follows him and actively helps him while posing
as a garrulous widow. The book is more powerful than most because of the
very real sense of menace that Christie creates and the feeling of evil
lurking in the air. Wingding suspense and a knock-out ending - the only
flaw was the focus on romance. Normally, it is nice to have a romantic
attachment develop in Christie's books as they provide a nice relief to
the mystery, but in this case I thought she should have concentrated only
on the mystery; romance is almost superfluous in such a setting. It's
interesting to think that while Tommy and Tuppence never actually existed,
there may have been characters like them - ordinary people who possessed
above-average intelligence who were picked to lead dangerous spy missions
and who succeeded precisely because they were so ordinary and therefore
not what the enemy was expecting.
::YOUR OPINION::
