‘Two young adventurers for hire. Willing to do anything, go anywhere. Pay must be good. No unreasonable offer reThe Secret Adversary - Agatha Christie
‘Two young adventurers for hire. Willing to do anything, go anywhere. Pay must be good. No unreasonable offer refused.’
This is the first novel where we meet Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Cowley, young, broke and in want of excitement, adventure and money. They set up as ‘The Young Adventurers Ltd’ and on the trail of the mysterious Jane Finn, whose name generates a very strange reaction. They end up chest deep in intrigue, murder and danger on the trail of this missing woman and the confidential documents she is supposed to have in her possession.
‘It had begun like a page of romance. Now, shorn of its glamour, it seemed to be turning to grim reality.’
This was a fun read, I loved meeting Tommy and Tuppence for the first time. It was a bit of a stretch to believe some of the coincidences that happened in this plot line but it was fast moving, hugely entertaining and thrilling....more
‘It is a duel to the death, mon ami. You and I on the one side, the Big Four on the other….in the future they have to reckon with Hercule Poirot.
After‘It is a duel to the death, mon ami. You and I on the one side, the Big Four on the other….in the future they have to reckon with Hercule Poirot.
After the success of The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd in 1926, Christie’s publishers were anxious for a new book and fast. But as we know 1926 was also the year that Christie suffered greatly in her private life culminating in her 11 day disappearance in December of that year. Originally written as a series in The Sketch in 1924 and titled The Man Who Was Number Four. The chapters were re-edited and published as The Big Four in 1927. It’s thought that Christie didn’t much like this book, referring to it as ‘that rotten book’ in correspondence. But it’s Poirot - Hastings and Japp are in it too and so I thought I would give it a go. I’m totally new to this one and had no recollection of having read or watched this one before.
The first chapter certainly is a delight. Hastings is back from the Argentine, where he’d been sent by Christie! His meeting with Poirot is sweet..’Mon ami Hastings…Mon ami Hastings!’ And we are thrown into a mystery pretty quickly. A man takes refuge in Poirot’s rooms, all very mysterious and suffering from shock. He describes four people, The Big Four. Number 1 is Li Chang Yen, number 2 an unknown American, number 3 an unknown Frenchwoman and number 4; the destroyer. Poirot knows of this gang and is keen to investigate but is meant to be going to South America for a job and too late realises that he is being got out of the way He returns to his rooms to find the man had died. The man is known as Mayerling who, Japp reveals is a secret service agent and had disappeared in Russia.
This fairly rattles along and I was really gripped by this mystery and the man, number four, known as the Destroyer. What follows is a series of adventures for Poirot and Hastings on the trail of The Big Four and the Destroyer taking in Dartmoor, murder, pools of blood ...more
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