This novel features our two bright young English heroes, Tommy and Tuppence, the latter being female. The plot is cleverly constructed and totally implausible. There is a fair bit of colloquial language in the direct speech, most of which seems dated today but may have been fine at the time. One of the main characters is American, and Christie also attempts to bring that out in the direct speech.

Tommy and Tuppence are in love with each other, but for reasons which escape me seem incapable of admitting it openly. The dialogue is at its worst when they are talking to each other early in the book, a stream of laboured and tiresome badinage. Needless to say and despite, or because of, their total lack of credentials, they solve the crime – a criminal conspiracy to ruin the nation by way of a general strike, thus opening the way for revolution. The nation in question is England, not the United Kingdom. As Christie has it, ‘England is saved’.

From what I read this book went down well when it was published in 1922, so expectations cannot have been high.