Customer Reviews

Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime - Tommy & Tuppence, Set 1

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The Tommy and Tuppence mysteries are frothier and lighter than the Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot mysteries, but it's their lightness that makes them unique. They're well translated into film in this delightful threepack of the first five mysteries.

"Secret Adversary" is the only movie-length episode: Tommy and Tuppence, childhood friends, reunite post WW1 in financially tight circumstances. To drum up some money, they decide to become adventurers. But their lighthearted venture becomes deadly serious when they become enmeshed in an international situation involving a packet of secret documents, a mysterious girl named Jane Finn, an American millionaire and an elusive mastermind called only "Mr. Brown."

"Affair of the Pink Pearl" takes place a while after "Adversary," and is definitelty frothier. Tommy finds the cure for Tuppence's boredom: a detective agency, which they take over and inject new life into. Soon they are called on to retrieve a stolen pink pearl.

"The House of Lurking Death" is the destination of T&T, when an appealing young woman comes to tell them that someone in her house sent her poisoned chocolates. At first it seems to be a straightforward case -- but nothing is as simple as it seems.

"Finessing the King" is a little more gruesome than its predecessors. Tuppence drags Tommy to a costume ball and then to the restaurant "Ace of Spades," where they find a woman in a Queen of Hearts costume, stabbed on the floor. All evidence points to her lover, including her dying words, but of course nothing is so simple.

"The Clergyman's Daughter" comes to T&T with her problems: She thinks that her house may be haunted, by a poltergeist that is scaring off the paying guests she has there. The two travel to the house to find out exactly what the source of the mayhem is.

If you are expecting the same level of complexity as a Poirot/Wimsey/Marple mystery, you will be disappointed. With the exception of "Adversary," these mysteries were all based on short stories, and so they can't afford to be too complex. Nevertheless, they are enormous fun and some of them will definitely keep you guessing. There's plenty of wry comedy in this series, including Tuppence's turn as a weird spiritualist, her array of hats ("there are... NUANCES to them!"), and Albert's obsession with movies. (His dying gangster act is especially funny)

Francesca Annis is enormous fun as Tuppence, with a delightfully flaky charm that covers a brain as brilliant -- if not more brilliant -- than Tommy's. Her 1920s wardrobe is definitely eye-catching; she is also one of the few women I've ever seen who could make Audrey Hepburn look buxom. James Warwick is as noticeable in a quieter way as Tommy, with his cute smile, delightfully confused attitude, and attempts at Sherlock-Holmesian suavity and brilliance. Reece Dinsdale is flawless as Albert, the loyal sidekick with a weakness for Rudolph Valentino movies.

Some of the secondary actors are not quite as good; almost the entire cast of "House of Lurking Death" (except the fanatic) is about as expressive as pine boards with painfully civil dialogue, the girl playing Lois overdoes the breathy damsel act, and the Esther actress is hammy, period. The title character of "Clergyman's Daughter" also has an annoying habit of starting every sentence with a strained "oh." The other supporting actors are very good, though.

This is a delightful collection, and well worth watching.

Good old Acorn Media, who has given us all those Wimsey and Poirot mysteries on tapes and DVDs, is now offering up the first set of <Tommy & Tuppence: Partners in Crime>. Here we have three tapes holding five episodes starring Francesca Annis and James Warwick as the young couple who decides to purchase a defunct detective agency and solve their crimes in the styles of popular fictional sleuths.
The first tape is dedicated to "The Secret Adversary," a full-length tale of espionage rather than crime. This was Agatha Christie's second novel (the first being the first of the Poirots) and was written to get some quick cash for keeping up her family home. Here they meet again after some years apart, fall in love, and become a team for the fun of it. The décor, as with the other mystery series, is immaculately period (around World War I); and the big feature of this series are the fetching and far-fetched outfits Tuppence dons by way of "disguise."
While this team was to last up to 1973 when their last novel appeared, this series emphasizes their youthful adventures and stands in good contrast to the Poirot and Marple sets available from Acorn Media and from A&E. Annis' antics are a delight--although in one episode (not yet released) she is made to look ridiculous--but Warwick turns out to be somewhat of a dull potato by contrast. Perhaps that was intentional. Who can tell?
The stories are light and quite enjoyable. "The Affair of the Pink Pearl" is their first official case as professional detectives. "The House of Lurking Death" concerns death by poisoning and the question of who the intended victim really is. "Finessing the King" centers around a costumed ball with a solution that telegraphs itself far too early; while "The Clergyman's Daughter" borrows the idea of a word game from the Holmes tale "The Musgrave Ritual" and bears a strong resemblance to "Gaslight."
Again, if this series suffers at all, it is only in contrast to the more serious doings in the Wimsey, Poirot and Marple tales. However, on its own merits, "Partners in Crime" certainly deserves a top rating.

This was an email I had to send to AcornMedia, the publishers of the DVD. I noticed that not one review mentioned the awful sound quality? I will followup this review when I check the DVDs at work..but...

Greetings!

I need to complain about the quality of your release of Tommy & Tuppence - Partners in Crime.

I recently rented Volume 1 from set 1 from Netflix, but noticed that on the episode of Affair of the pink Pearl, the volume for the program is very low - very unwatchable, but Secret Adversary for sound was good.

Thinking this might have been a Netflix issue, I recently bought this from an online vendor and noticed the exact same issue.

On Volume Two - the same issue House of Lurking Death -- volume was recorded at a low level, yet the other two episodes were perfect.

Whoever mastered these DVD's did an absolutely terrible job, and I will have no choice but to return my purchase, sadly, I loved this series when i was growing up watching it on PBS - but I cant watch it with the volume issue!

Are there any plans to reissue with the CORRECT audio volume?

I searched for this program for a couple of years and was so excited that it finally became available on amazon! I hope the rest of the episodes will also be released since there are only five of them in this set (I believe there are 11 total?). I used to watch this show with my mother when it was on PBS Mystery! in the eighties. It is worth watching just for the aesthetics. Francesca Annis is so beautiful and really carries the fashions of the time period (post WWI) well. If you like Hercule Poirot, and on a related note if you like House of Eliott (which is not a mystery but is set in the 1920's), you'll like Partners In Crime.

Purchased the "Tommy & Tuppence: Set 1" as a gift. Picture quality was wonderful on all episodes and the sound quality on "The Secret Adversary" was likewise. However, the sound on the shorter episodes was non-existent. I contacted Acorn Media and they said that the master from the original production was in "mono", therefore not of high quality. Acorn Media suggested I change the television setting from stereo to mono to improve the sound quality. It didn't. Only turning the television volume up as high as it can go, are you able to hear any dialog. However, by doing this, you also hear an irritating "HISS" throughout the program, which is nearly as loud as the dialog/music. Forget it.

I am going to return the DVD and get the VHS, to see if it's any better.

[June 1, 2006]
VHS is much better. Not a VHS fan, but you gotta go where you gotta go.

"The Secret Adversary" and the short story collection "Partners in Crime" (both from 1922) were Agatha Christie's second and third-ever book, but their quirky protagonists, Tommy and "Tuppence" (Prudence) Beresford, were not to share the eventful career of their colleague Hercule Poirot, who had debuted two years earlier with "The Mysterious Affair at Styles;" nor that of Christie's almost equally well-loved (and personal favorite) village sleuth Miss Marple, whose first adventure ("Murder at the Vicarage") would not be published until 1930. Christie only authored
three more Beresford mysteries: 1941's "N or M?" (a WWII spy thriller set in a coastal guesthouse), 1968's "By the Pricking of My Thumbs" (where a visit to a nursing home prompts them to track down the real-life object of a painting, only to find themselves hunting for a child murderer) and "Postern of Fate" (1973), the last book written by Christie (although not the last one published); more a postscript to the superior earlier stories.

Not as eccentric as Poirot and Miss Marple, Tommy and Tuppence are nevertheless immediately likeable, and perfectly cast in this 1980 - 1982 TV series with Francesca Annis and James Warwick, reprising their successful collaboration from the 1980 realization of Christie's "Why Didn't They Ask Evans?" Taking its title from the second entry in the Beresford cycle, originally only the short stories contained in "Partners in Crime" were developed for television; "The Secret Adversary," although set earlier in the literary originals' sequence and providing critical background information on the couple's friendship, was only adapted as a feature film two years later. (Fortunately, the original order is restored in this video and DVD release.)

Although "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" had already proved Christie to be a writer of exceptional talent, her first Tommy and Tuppence adventures - penned for financial reasons as much as out of a desire to write - still show her style as a work in progress, sometimes lacking certainty as to what exactly works in terms of characterization and storylines. While she succeeds, like in the first Poirot mystery, to immediately draw in her audience, and the Beresfords are presented in as much detail as the little Belgian with the many gray cells, the plotlines - particularly that of "The Secret Adversary" - sometimes stretch credibility and have a whiff of the kind of story that Arthur Conan Doyle could get away with 20 years earlier, but which Christie herself (wisely) only took up infrequently later (and generally with more solidly constructed plotlines and often with Poirot as the main character). Thus, if the televised versions of these early Tommy and Tuppence stories appear somewhat less convincing than the subsequent, more acclaimed adaptations of Christie's Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries, this is at least partly owing to the literary originals themselves: The creators of the TV series reproduced the mysteries' "swinging Twenties" setting successfully and with a fine eye for detail; and Francesca Annis and James Warwick give terriffic performances as the vivacious, hat-loving Tuppence and her (almost) equally witty, slightly more settled husband.

Tommy and Tuppence's boisterous young assistant Alfred is portrayed by Reece Dinsdale (best known, since, as Guildenstern in Kenneth Branagh's "Hamlet" and D.I. Scott in the mid-1990s British cop show "Thief Takers"); and there are recurrent appearances by British TV regular Arthur Cox as Detective Inspector Marriott, in the televised version chiefly responsible for establishing the couple as owners of Blunt's International Detective Agency (in the books, the agency is a cover for the Beresfords' spy activities), who informally continues to consult them whenever he feels that Scotland Yard's official capacities have reached their limits.

"The Secret Adversary" sees Tommy and Tuppence after the end of WWI, both out of work (Tommy has been an intelligence officer, Tuppence a nurse) and looking for adventure. That opportunity presents itself when, as a result of two newspaper ads, they are sent on the hunt for a lost treaty which, if published now, would cause a general strike and throw the country into turmoil, thus playing into the hands of a mysterious criminal known only as "Mr. Brown," and set on nothing less than the attainment of absolute power. The key to the treaty is believed to lie with a young American woman named Jane Finn, who has likewise disappeared and whose cousin Julius P. Hersheimer (or is he really?), Tommy and Tuppence learn, is "the third richest man in America." - Further notable appearances here include those of Alec McCowen (influential barrister Sir James Peele Edgerton), Gavan O'Herlihy (Hersheimer), Peter Barkworth (intelligence chief Carter) and Honor Blackman, as well as George Baker of "Inspector Wexford" fame, as members of "Mr. Brown"'s gang.

The shorter "Partners in Crime" mysteries have Tommy and Tuppence hunting for a vanished perl and uncovering, in turn, the mastermind behind a string of poisonings (drawing on Christie's trademark knowledge acquired when she was a nurse in WWI herself), the culprit of a murder during a masked ball, and the evil spirits responsible for a series of seemingly unearthly occurrences in an old house (again drawing on Christie's own experience, as the sleuthing couple's client is compelled - like Christie's mother periodically - to rent out rooms in her large house as a means of survival). The common trait of these mysteries is Tommy and Tuppence's repeated assumption of the roles of famous literary detectives; most obviously by attending the aforementioned masked ball disguised as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

While not quite on the level of Christie's more famous mysteries and their recent TV adaptations, this series is an enjoyable romp through the the swinging 1920s' London. And who knows - maybe 20+ years after its initial airing we'll see a realization of one of Tommy and Tuppence's later adventures? Annis and Warwick might be about the right age for "N or M" now ... or even better, "By the Pricking of My Thumbs," which unlike the earlier mysteries easily stands up with the best of Christie's other works!

Also recommended:
The Secret Adversary
Partners in Crime (Tommy and Tuppence Mysteries)
By The Pricking Of My Thumbs (Tommy and Tuppence)
The Secret of Chimneys
The Seven Dials Mystery (St. Martin's Minotaur Mysteries)
Why Didn't They Ask Evans? (St. Martin's Minotaur Mysteries)
Agatha Christie's Romantic Detectives (Tommy & Tuppence 1 & 2 / Why Didn't They Ask Evans? / Seven Dials Mystery / Agatha Christie A Life in Pictures)

I had never read any books by Agatha Christie, but I was familiar with two of her famous sleuths, Poirot and Miss Marple, mostly through their televised adventures. But they really didn't appeal to me too much. Then I discovered Tommy & Tuppence, and I was just in love. the reason I love this series is because the characters AREN"T Poirot or Miss Marple. The concept intrigued me, the lighthearted adventures of a husband and wife detective team. The show is amazing, it's funny, witty, thrilling, and absolutely charming. Francesca Annis is simply divine as Tuppence, and James Warwick is simply suave as Tommy. Both have a tendency of hiding their brilliant minds beneath an aura of frivolity and from a sense that maybe they're not entirely sure what they're doing or how to get out of their situation. The flirtatious wit and charm and chemistry between the main characters is a delight, as is how they employ their skills to unravelling the various mysteries that land on their doorstep. Highly recommended.

I watched Tommy & Tuppence in 1984 when I was 14. Now, a bit older, but still a huge fan of Francisca Annis,I enjoy them once again on DVD. As far as I am concerned, television doesn't get much better than this. Thanks not only to the lovely Francisca Annis, but also to just how all comes together and makes this work out so well. The actors, the decors, the music, the plots, this is exactly the kind of British mysteries we miss so much these days.
Also the theatrical way of acting, and the parody Tommy & Tuppence make of the detective business gives this series the kind of playful fun that makes it one of the most enjoyble tv series ever.

I secretly hoped Francisca could be almost Miss Marple by now, picking up the series from her predecessor who passed away in 1998, but I heard that despite that she is in her 60s now she still has the same good looks that make her the only actress alive that could rival Audrey Hepburn in style.
All I can say is: BBC, please film all the other Agatha Christie novels with this couple again!

Tommy and Tuppence are Agatha Christie light. Good fun and not heavy handed. But the dvd sound quality on two of the episodes is dreadful. To hear the actors the volumn must be turned very high and then there is background static. What a shame to ruin this as the picture quality is better than some Acorn productions.

The stories are wonderful. The acting is cute and campy in a very good sense. Unfortunately, the DVD encoding leaves a lot to be desired. The main problem is that the 2 channel surround shunts all sound to the rear speakers (except for the first episode which is encoded properly). If you cannot turn off the surround sound on your system, this will become annoying quickly! It is very much worth purchasing, but be aware of the sound problems.