1922: The Secret Adversary

Publisher: The Bodley Head, 1922 (UK); Dodd, Mead & Co., 1922 (US)

Series: Tommy and Tuppence

Category: Novel

Cross refs:

Warning, spoilers!

For her second novel, Christie switched genres, from detective fiction to espionage thriller. It is virtually impossible to describe The Secret Adversary without using the word ‘romp’, and it’s clear that Christie enjoyed writing this story. Indeed, she observed that it was much easier to write a thriller than a work of detective fiction.[1] Yet, readers would be forgiven for feeling slightly taken aback by their first encounter with the ‘Young Adventurers’ (fig. 1) – this certainly isn’t a ‘Poirot’ – and it seems that Christie’s publisher had the same initial misgivings, hesitating over this second novel and ‘undecided whether to publish it or not’.[2] It was published, however, and with fewer corrections than Styles, by The Bodley Head in the UK and by Dodd, Mead & Co. in the US (in 1922 Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, took over the John Lane Company, after several years of joint publishing activity).[3] Again, as with Styles, The Weekly Times took serial rights.

While the war raged in the distant background of Styles, the social and political climate of wartime Europe played an integral role in the plot of The Secret Adversary. The book opens onboard the Lusitania (fig. 2) on its ill-fated journey from New York to Liverpool, with a young American girl, Jane Finn, being handed a package to take to the American Embassy in London. The man giving her the package, Danvers, realised that he may not survive, and indeed, he does not make it.  

The sinking of the Lusitania on 7 May 1915 was fresh in the minds of many in 1922. The incident had been widely reported in the press, and it also featured in propaganda to bolster support for the war. Questions over the legitimacy of the attack on the passenger liner and its cargo were also hotly debated in its aftermath. Perhaps most haunting was the fact that the ship sunk in just 18 minutes; there wasn’t even time to launch all of the lifeboats – in fact only six of the 48 lifeboats were launched – and the angle at which the ship sank made dispatching any at all difficult, with passengers having to leap over a void to reach them. Some 1,198 passengers and crew lost their lives, with hundreds of bodies washing ashore (as Danvers does in Christie’s novel), but many never being found.[4] One of the saddest aspects of the disaster was the sheer number of people who vanished, leaving only their names and booking information to commemorate that they existed at all, and it was perhaps this fact that inspired Christie to make her Jane Finn disappear after the disaster. For although her name is found on the list of survivors, she appears to have vanished without a trace.

As with Styles, the protagonists of The Secret Adversary were based on figures that Christie encountered in her daily life. A couple chatting in an A.B.C. cafe about a person named ‘Jane Fish’ sewed the first seeds for this new novel:  

It struck me as a most entertaining name. I went away with the name in my mind, Jane Fish. That, I thought, would make a good beginning to a story – a name overheard in a tea shop – an unusual name so that whoever overheard it remembered it. A name like Jane Fish – or perhaps Jane Finn would be even better. I settled for Jane Finn – and started writing straight away. I called it The Joyful Venture first – then The Young Adventurers –and finally it became The Secret Adversary.[5] 

The couple who make it their business to find the mysterious Jane Finn are Tommy and Tuppence, a young, but hard-up pair, with plenty of pluck. Tommy is described with Christie’s characteristic wit and concision as ‘pleasantly ugly. Nondescript yet unmistakably … a gentleman and sportsman’. Tuppence, who often reminds the reader she can ‘look after herself, thank you’, has ‘elfin’ features and a ‘determined chin’, with an appearance that ‘presented a valiant attempt at smartness’.

‘He was pleasantly ugly. Nondescript yet unmistakably … a gentleman and sportsman.’

Christie decided that this pair, ‘a girl who had been in the ATS or the VAD and a young man who had been in the army’, would ‘both be rather desperate, looking for a job, and then they would meet each other – perhaps they would have met in the past? And then? Then, I thought, they would be involved in – yes espionage: this would be a spy book, a thriller, not a detective story.’[6]

The poverty of her protagonists was again something Christie pulled from her contemporary setting. Unemployment in interwar Britain was high and palpable in daily life. As Christie observed:

Young people were desperate. They had come out of the Services and had no jobs to go to. Young men were always ringing our doorbell, trying to sell stockings, or offering some household gadget … They had been lieutenants, naval and military, and now they were reduced to this.[7]

Tuppence’s VAD experience was drawn from Christie’s own time nursing during the war, while her reminiscence of Tommy tricking a sister into giving him beer as a tonic also echoes a story Christie tells in her autobiography of a soldier who wrote a requirement for ‘port wine’ on the board at the end of his hospital bed, claiming it had been written by the doctor.[8] Similarly, Tuppence’s knowledge of the French pensionnat that she almost finds herself being sent to in the undercover role of Jane Finn was likely grounded in the fact that Christie herself had attended a series of French schools in Paris: Mademoiselle T.’s, Miss Hogg’s school at Auteuil, Les Marroniers and Miss Dryden’s finishing school, just off the Arc de Triomphe in the Avenue du Bois.[9] 

We first meet Tommy and Tuppence as they bump into each other at Dover Street underground station in London. This is now one of the many disused stations, buried in the warren of tunnels below the city, not far from what is now Green Park station. Dover Street had opened in 1903 but closed in 1933 when the new Green Park station was built to better manage capacity at this central London location. The disused station and tunnels were later to be used during the Second World War to store art works from the nearby museums, as well as offices for the London Transport Executive Board.[10]

While The Secret Adversary follows a different course to Styles, with an international spy ring and the mysterious Mr Brown, a shadowy figure responsible for masterminding and puppeteering an uprising from within, we still see some of Christie’s set pieces in the form of disguises – false beards, shoe elevators, wigs – and the physiognomic predetermination of her characters: ‘There was something wrong about Mr Wittington. The combination of his sleek prosperity and his shifty eye was not attractive.’

We also see here Christie’s first use of the femme fatale in the form of Mrs Vandemeyer, whose beauty ‘owes something to art’ (a phrase we will hear again), but who ‘despite her swaying grace, and the almost ethereal beauty of her face’, generated a feeling of menace:

For the first time Tuppence felt afraid ... she watched the long cruel line of the red curving mouth, and again she felt that sensation of panic pass over her. Her usual self-confidence deserted her … Here, indeed, she might expect no mercy.

As well as the emergence of a charismatic, mesmeric character, here in the form of Sir James Peel Edgerton, who has a strange power over those around him:

[A] man of striking appearance. Just a shade over average height, he nevertheless conveyed the impression of a big man. His face, clean-shaven and exquisitely mobile, was stamped with an expression of power and force far beyond the ordinary. Magnetism seemed to radiate from him.

This magnetic power was something that would feature again in later books. 

Despite the initial misgivings of her publisher, The Secret Adversary was well received by reviewers. The Times Literary Supplement described it as ‘a whirl of thrilling adventures’,[11] and The New York Times Book Review praised Christie’s ability to keep the reader guessing as to the identity of the illusive Mr Brown until the very end, while also noting that she ‘gives a sense of plausibility to the most preposterous situations and developments’![12] A backhanded compliment to say the least.  

The Secret Adversary is one of my favourite Agatha Christie books, not just for the story, which is indeed a romp, but for the relationship between Tommy and Tuppence, which feels real in its slow-burning, stiff, English correctness, characteristics highlighted by contrast to the impulsive hustling of the American millionaire, Julius B. Hersheimmer, who joins the pair in their search for Jane Finn (at one stage proposing to Tuppence in the process). It is a relationship we see develop over the years, throughout the Tommy and Tuppence series, which perhaps gives it greater authenticity. It is also a relationship of equals – equal respect and equal agency – giving it a timelessness for readers today.     

[1] Christie 2011, p. 281.

[2] Christie 2011, p. 281.

[3] Francesca Tancini, Walter Crane: Books in Colour (London, 2025), Appendix II.   

[4] See ‘The Sinking of the Lusitania’, Royal Museums Greenwich, n.d., https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/sinking-lusitania [accessed 5 March 2025]; ‘The Lusitania Disaster’, Library of Congress, n.d., https://www.loc.gov/collections/world-war-i-rotogravures/articles-and-essays/the-lusitania-disaster/  [accessed 5 March 2025]; ‘RMS Lusitania: 18 Minutes that Shocked the World’, Imperial War Museums, n.d., https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/18-minutes-that-shocked-the-world [accessed 5 March 2025].

[5] Christie 2011, p. 280.

[6] Christie 2011, p. 281.

[7] Christie 2011, pp. 280–81.

[8] Christie 2011, p. 231.

[9] Christie 2011, pp. 128, 152.

[10] ‘Dover Street: Alight Here for Green Park’, London Transport Museum, n.d.,

https://www.ltmuseum.co.uk/whats-on/hidden-london/dover-street-alight-here-green-park [accessed 14 May 2026].  

[11]  The Times Literary Supplement, 26 January 1922.

[12] The New York Times Book Review, 11 June 1922.