Partners in Crime by Agatha ChristieMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is a bit of fun, and not to be taken too seriously.
Following their success in the first book, Tommy and Tuppence, now married, apparently received a big whack of money as a reward for their help, because money no longer seems to be a consideration for them (and at one point one of them says they are "rich," though this seems to be an exaggeration). Tommy is able to quit his office job with the Secret Service and take on a detective agency with only occasional clients, which is a front for some kind of Russian spy operation that has been taken down. The Chief, their contact in the Secret Service, wants it kept running as a honey-trap and says they can run it how they like and take whatever cases they care to. Perhaps he's paying them, but if so it's never mentioned. They can clearly afford to employ Albert, the young lad who helped them in their previous case, as an office boy, as well as keep up their own establishment.
They then, basically, play at being detectives, inspired by various fictional sleuths, which is an occasion for gentle parody from Christie of her contemporaries (and herself; one of the models they select is Poirot). They have fake personas - Theodore Blunt (the name of the man who owned the front business) and his "confidential secretary" Miss Robinson - and their standard shtick when a client comes is to pretend that Mr Blunt is in conference with Scotland Yard and engaged on other important cases for important people, but can manage to spare the time for the new client somehow. The cases they take on are real, though, at least after the first publicity-stunt one, and they're mostly successful (with one embarrassing exception). They solve murders, thefts, a disappearance, and eventually - through a suspenseful struggle - foil the Russian spies they were put there to trap.
Some of the cases are clever, and others, to me, were painfully obvious before they solved them, like (view spoiler). Coincidence plays an important role sometimes, though more in smoothing the story and making it more compact than in getting them out of trouble as such; for example, they are talking through a case in the newspapers in a cafe and their Scotland Yard contact happens to be sitting at the next table and overhears their solution, which, again, was pretty obvious to me but appears to be fresh to him.
I've read a few of the other classic detectives that are parodied, though most of them were new to me, and I've picked up one of them as a result of this book (it's extraordinarily far-fetched, and I can see why it fell into obscurity). Christie clearly read widely in her genre, as befits a popular genre writer; there are references to other well-known contemporary novelists in some of her other books, too, as there naturally would be when people are discussing crime in a time when crime fiction was so popular. This is a combination of parody and actual detective writing, varying in quality like most short story collections, but overall entertaining.
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