Review: N or M?

N or M? by Agatha Christie
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was thinking for a while that this was unaccountably bad for a Christie book, especially given that she'd been writing for about 25 years by the time it came out. For example, there was a Cavalry Rescue that seemed staggeringly unlikely, both in its last-second timing, its apparent silence, and even its existence at all. But later, it's given a more than adequate explanation, and I revised my opinion. It still does rely a bit on people saying random things that turn out to be significant, but the plot is not outright dependent on coincidence.

The strength of Tommy and Tuppence is that they're a great pair, with a strong relationship, and they balance each other's weaknesses. Tommy is solid and reliable, but not very bright; Tuppence is clever, but can be erratic. So they're at their best when working together, but in this book, as in the first book of their adventures, they spend a significant amount of time separated, after Tommy does something boneheaded and gets captured. There's some good tension, though, the villains are clever but not quite clever enough, and overall it's a good time.

It was an interesting choice to let the characters age in real time. They're now middle-aged (in their 40s), rather than the inexperienced young people they were when we first met them, and everyone including their newly-adult children treats them as past any usefulness when it comes to action, espionage, detection or other direct contributions to the war effort (it's now World War II, in the book as in real life at the time it was published). The subverting of these expectations is one of the strengths of the book.

It's not clear what they've done in the interim; the second book of the series, which I thought I'd read but apparently haven't, has them running a private investigation agency, but at the time of this book they don't seem to have any occupation, nor is a previous one mentioned. Perhaps they inherited some money, enough to live modestly on, but why not continue private investigation anyway? Perhaps they wanted to focus on raising their children.

This book apparently got Christie a visit from the authorities, who wondered why she had called one of the characters Bletchley when nobody was supposed to know about Bletchley Park. They seem to have been satisfied by her explanation that she'd spent an unpleasant few hours at the station of that name on a railway journey once. It reflects paranoia that was no doubt current at the time; in the fiction, the British government, police force and military are rife with fascist sympathizers and fifth columnists, and the goal of the story is to uncover their network by identifying the leader, who is codenamed either N or M. N is known to be a man and M a woman, so that doesn't narrow the field. Pretty much everyone at the seaside boarding-house where the spymaster is thought to be staying is suspected for one reason or another, but the resolution is still surprising.

It's a good period piece, and encourages me to continue with the series (and go back and read those short stories in Book 2).

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