Second paragraph of third chapter:
“I think you’ve given him too much, Tommy,” said Tuppence innocently. “I fancy he wants to give some of it back.”
This was Agatha Christie’s second published book, in 1922. Tommy and Tuppence, a young man and a young woman recently relieved of war duties, start their own business called “The Young Adventurers”, and are hired by the British secret service to thwart the shadowy mastermind behind various political agitations, such as the Bolshevik Revolution, and who threatens to unleash upon the United Kingdom the ultimate horror: a Labour government.
They go through various adventures including a vastly rich young American and a wily Scottish lawyer and MP, and eventually the Secret Adversary is unmasked, his identity not being a surprise to the attentive reader (there’s a moment at the end of Chapter 12 which narrows it down considerably). The motivation of the villain is fairly clear, but his means seem to be as fiendish as might be convenient for the plot. There is a romantic subplot also, which again won’t come as a surprise to the reader, and it gets the two protagonists to where they need to be.
I thought The Secret Adversary was very silly when I first read it at the age of twelve; and I still think it is very silly now that I am fifty-eight. You can get it here.
The book did make me wonder about Agatha Christie’s knowledge of Ireland. Clara Boehmer, Agatha Christie’s mother, was born in Dublin in 1854, but to a career army officer father (born in Martinique, died in Jersey) and and English mother (born and brought up in Chichester), and her father’s regiment moved to Malta, along with the infant Clara, before she was a year old. So I don’t think we can look for Irish sensibilities from that source.
The background incident which sparks the action of the plot of The Secret Adversary takes place on the Lusitania as it is sinking off the coast of County Cork in 1915, and there is then a hurried shuffle without incident across Ireland until Holyhead is reached and some action actually happens. The Secret Adversary is funding Sinn Fein in Chapter 8, and in Chapter 17 it turns out that he also has a prominent Irish Unionist MP on the team. As with the Bolsheviks, and as with labour disputes in England, in the world of The Secret Adversary the political problems of Ireland are entirely generated by external troublemakers.
Of course when Christie was writing The Secret Adversary in 1921, with its 1920 setting, the Irish situation would have been frankly confusing to the English newspaper reader. The War of Independence was in full flow, and the government was desperately and ultimately unsuccessfully trying to spin the situation in its favour to the British and international public.
In April 1921, in fact, the Lloyd George government attempted to discredit Sinn Fein by publishing a dossier “proving” that they were tools of the Bolsheviks; this failed to convince anyone, and King George V was asking the Irish for peace two months later. But that episode obviously resonated in Christie’s mind for the incident with the Sinn Feiner in Chapter 8. I did wonder if the wily Scottish lawyer and MP character was based partly on Edward Carson, but I think Christie would have been too sympathetic to Carson to create such an unflattering literary portrait.
More broadly, over the next fifty-plus years of her writing career, the Agatha Christe wiki lists only one short story, “The Apples of the Hesperides”, as actually set in Ireland (see analysis here), and another dozen characters across her entire œuvre as having Irish connections. The garden in Hallowe’en Party is explicitly based on the Italian sunken garden on Ilnacullin island in Bantry Bay. According to Irish expert John Curran, she did a tour of Great Gardens of Ireland in the 1950s (and Miss Marple then goes on a smilar tour of Famous Houses and Gardens of Great Britain in the late novel Nemesis).
But it rather looks like Ireland is a mere background detail for almost all of Agatha Christie’s work. There’s no reason why it should be more than that, of course, and no evidence that it could have been either.
I’m hopping through the Agatha Christie novels in my own special way. Next will be Peril at End House. Probably.
Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Death on the Nile | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party
