Tommy and Tuppence's adopted child

[Abe]

How come the little girl that Tommy and Tuppence adopted is never aknowledged again? I thought it was weird.

[Dave]

What story did that happen in?

[Abe]

N or M? Tommy and Tuppence are in a tital of five Agatha Christie books. There my favorite detectives by Christie.

[shyster]

Always liked Tommy and Tuppence myself, though they appeared in only a couple of books.

If I recall correctly, the only book following the one you cited was the last one, which came out twenty years later in the sixties. They were an elderly retired couple by then. Kids move on and there may simply have been no reason for the child to be mentioned.

Considering the multitude of Poirots, the fact that some of her other characters were so infrequently used is interesting. I always felt that Harley Quin was an intriguing character, but maybe she felt that she had done everything she could with him.

(I've got a nice first edition of the one Harley Quin book, which has a select place on my shelves.)

[Xavier Lechard]

Originally posted by shyster
Always liked Tommy and Tuppence myself, though they appeared in only a couple of books.

If I recall correctly, the only book following the one you cited was the last one, which came out twenty years later in the sixties.

Christie went back to Tommy and Tuppence in her later days, and wrote two further novels featuring them: "By The Pricking of My Thumbs" in the late sixties, and the awful "Postern of Fate" that turned to be both the couple's and Agatha's last bow.

[Xavier Lechard]

My memory as I get older is not anymore what it used to be, yet I think adopted child is briefly mentioned in first pages of "Postern of Fate". I am not quite sure, though, and don't have the book at hand to verify.

[shyster]

My chagrin--I was operating from memory, which is a leaky bastion at best.

I must admit to not having read "Postern of Fate"--and not even realizing that it was there, though I now find it referenced in a Christie chronology. Don't know whether it was good or bad, though the title has a certain clunkiness....

I made a serious effort to catch "Curtain" and "Sleeping Murder", but I guess "Postern" slipped by me because in 1973 I was in my first year of college and was too darned busy to keep up with my literary interests. Another factor may be that I had largely moved on to other authors at that point and I never cared that much for Christie's later output.

Main thing about GAM I seem to remember from that period is being irritated because I had no television available and thus had to miss Lord Peter Wimsey on Masterpiece Theater. I was livid about that.

On the brighter side, it is nice to know there is a "new" Christie waiting for me at this late date.

[stoke_moran]

Postern of Fate really is a splendid work. It's Christie boldly experimenting with post-modernism. While some critics would complain about the way in which she introduces ideas and then suddenly discards them halfway through, and pulls a solution out of thin air that makes no sense, she's doing something quite clever: she's commenting on the structure of the detective story, and the fundamental inessentiality of the genre. The search for the truth that characterises the detective story, Christie suggests, is meaningless, for what is truth? In a world where there no distinction can be made between literature and other forms of writing (this e-mail, for instance, is as finely crafted a work as Hamlet), truth cannot be found, and the solution, when it comes, will inevitably be nonsensical.

[robert@fm]

Originally Posted by shyster

Don't know whether it [PoF]was good or bad, though the title has a certain clunkiness....

Er, actually the phrase "Postern of Fate" comes from a poem, part of which is quoted in a story in the collection "Parker Pyne Investigates" (hmmm, Parker Pyne = Parker Pen? ), and is (IMO) rather beautiful in context...

[robert@fm]

It's The Gates of Damascus by James Elroy Fletcher, and to my mind is lovely...

[Patrick Gore]

Originally Posted by stoke_moran

Postern of Fate really is a splendid work. It's Christie boldly experimenting with post-modernism. While some critics would complain about the way in which she introduces ideas and then suddenly discards them halfway through, and pulls a solution out of thin air that makes no sense, she's doing something quite clever: she's commenting on the structure of the detective story, and the fundamental inessentiality of the genre. The search for the truth that characterises the detective story, Christie suggests, is meaningless, for what is truth? In a world where there no distinction can be made between literature and other forms of writing (this e-mail, for instance, is as finely crafted a work as Hamlet), truth cannot be found, and the solution, when it comes, will inevitably be nonsensical.

I must raise the same objection to this as I have to Brian from Brooklyn's claims about Christie elsewhere. If the meaning of postmodern is to be degraded in usage to apply to any plot that doesn't hold together, then doesn't that make nonsense of the distinction between a novel constructed in deliberate defiance of the rules of play (Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 as a detective novel with no solution, for example) and a novel that is just poorly constructed? I don't mean to be a curmudgeon about this, but I'm really intervening for the sake of postmodernism as a coherent concept.

Brian