The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
The Secret Adversary
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Prologue: the Lusitania, 7 May 1915
It was 2 p.m. on the afternoon of May 7, 1915. The Lusitania had been struck by two torpedoes in succession and was sinking rapidly, while the boats were being launched with all possible speed. The women and children were being lined up awaiting their turn. Some still clung desperately to husbands and fathers; others clutched their children closely to their breasts. One girl stood alone, slightly apart from the rest. She was quite young, not more than eighteen. She did not seem afraid, and her grave, steadfast eyes looked straight ahead.
“I beg your pardon.”
A man’s voice beside her made her start and turn. She had noticed the speaker more than once amongst the first-class passengers. There had been a hint of mystery about him which had appealed to her imagination. He spoke to no one. If anyone spoke to him he was quick to rebuff the overture. Also he had a nervous way of looking over his shoulder with a swift, suspicious glance.
The free preview stops there. The prologue continues, and so do the twenty-eight chapters after it — the whole novel is in the ebook below.
Download Full EPUB1922
~78,000 words (estimated)
Approx. 4.4 hours
Tommy and Tuppence #1
London, Kent and the Welsh coast, 1919–1920
Prologue + 28 chapters
EPUB · AZW3 · KEPUB
0.43 MB (EPUB) · 0.57 MB (AZW3) · 0.48 MB (KEPUB)
Public domain in the United States
Project Gutenberg #1155
The Secret Adversary is Agatha Christie’s second novel and the first of the five Tommy and Tuppence books. In 1919 two demobilised twenty-somethings with no money and no patience for the jobs on offer advertise themselves as “The Young Adventurers, Ltd.” — willing to do anything, go anywhere — and the first serious answer to the advertisement is a man who wants them to find a girl who went down with the Lusitania in 1915 carrying a treaty that could break the British government. What follows is a manhunt through London lodging houses, Soho meeting rooms and a Kentish country house, run by a criminal everyone calls Mr. Brown and nobody has seen. Wikipedia’s entry on the novel covers the publication and the adaptations; the book itself is a straight chase.
It is not a whodunnit in the Poirot sense. The reader is told almost at once that the enemy is an Englishman who hides behind ordinary faces, and the pleasure is in watching two amateurs — one of them in a maid’s cap, one of them locked in a room with a Faust print for company — work out which of the ordinary faces it is. Christie plays fair with the clue that settles it, and the answer arrives in the last three chapters. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #1155, from which this edition is set.
The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie: Summary, Characters & Themes
This summary and analysis of The Secret Adversary follows the book in its own order: two young people with no money, an advertisement that reads more like a dare than a job application, and a name — Jane Finn — that turns out to be worth killing for. Christie published it in 1922, two years after her first novel, and it is the book in which she stopped being a one-off and became a career. It is also the first of the five Tommy and Tuppence books, and the one where the pair are still new to each other, still broke, and not yet in the habit of being taken seriously.
The plot is a chase for a document. In May 1915 a messenger on the Lusitania, Danvers, hands an oilskin packet to a young American girl and tells her to wait for a personal advertisement in the Times headed “Shipmate”; the ship is torpedoed, the girl is picked up, and the packet disappears. Four years later the treaty is being used as a weapon in London, and a man known only as Mr. Brown starts closing every door through which it might be recovered. Agatha Christie’s Wikipedia entry records how quickly the book followed The Mysterious Affair at Styles and how much of its politics belonged to 1919 rather than to 1922.
What makes the book work is that Christie keeps her detectives amateurs and lets them be frightened. Tuppence talks her way into a Mayfair flat as a house-parlourmaid and spends the middle of the novel listening at doors; Tommy hides behind a curtain in a Soho meeting room and is knocked on the head for it. Neither of them can shoot, drive, or lie convincingly for long, and the novel gets its tension from that: every professional in the story — the Intelligence officer, the lawyer, the millionaire — is more competent and less available than they are.
The mystery is fair, which is worth saying about a thriller. The clue that identifies Mr. Brown is given to the reader early, in plain sight, and the reason nobody sees it is the same reason the book still reads well: the villain is defined by ordinariness. Christie had already worked out that a criminal who looks like a man on a train is more frightening than one who looks like a criminal, and here she builds an entire organisation around that idea, with a chief who gives orders by telephone and is described by his own followers as a fable.
If the book leaves you wanting more Christie from the same years, The Murder on the Links (1923) is the Poirot novel that followed it, with a murder on a golf course in France and a plot built the same way, out of misread letters and convenient alibis. The Big Four (1927) goes further in the direction this book points: Poirot against a conspiracy rather than a household, with a hidden chief and a number for a name. Both are free here in the same three formats.
Historical Context
The novel is set in the year after the war, and it is full of the year after the war. Tuppence has been “combed out” of government work, one of the hundreds of thousands of women pushed out of wartime offices to make room for returning men; Tommy has been demobilised with a wound, a gratuity and no trade. Their flat-hunting, their half-crowns, and the queue of ex-officers applying for jobs they are told they are too old for are all drawn from 1919, when the post-war boom had not yet turned and the newspapers were full of both.
The political panic is period too. Christie gives her conspirators Bolshevik money, Irish-American funding, a plan to buy a London newspaper, and a general strike timed for the 29th — a composite of the fears that filled the British press in 1919 and 1920, when strikes in the docks, the railways and the police were read as the first move of a revolution. The treaty in the oilskin packet is invented, but the assumption behind it, that a secret clause signed with a foreign power could bring down a government, was not: the war had been fought on the promise that such bargains would stop.
The economics are exact, and they are half the joke. The advertisement costs about five shillings, of which Tuppence pays half a crown; Whittington offers a hundred pounds for three months in Paris and pays fifty in advance, in five-pound notes that she waves about Piccadilly Circus because nobody has anything smaller, and two of which are “irretrievably dead” by the end of an evening of dinner and a show. Mrs. Vandemeyer offers a housemaid fifty or sixty pounds and asks no questions, and Julius gets his Rolls-Royce by telling the owner that a car like that is worth twenty thousand dollars, then offering him fifty. Everyone in the book is priced, and the running total is part of the plot.
Christie was writing her second book while working in a Torquay dispensary, and the novel carries the marks of a writer learning on the job — short chapters, a large cast, one coincidence too many. It sold well enough to keep her, and it fixed the template she would use whenever she wanted a holiday from Poirot. This page is set from the Project Gutenberg transcription, #1155, the 1922 text released by the project in 1998 and corrected since.
Key Characters & Literary Archetypes
- Thomas Beresford (Tommy): Demobilised from the army with a wound, a small gratuity and no plan. Tommy is the slow one in the partnership and knows it, which is why he is allowed to be brave: he walks into rooms he should not enter, bluffs his way through a conversation about papers he has never seen, and spends several chapters as a prisoner who is kept alive only because his captors think he knows more than he does. When the escape finally comes it is not by cleverness: he unhooks a framed Faust and Mephistopheles and brings it down on a man’s head. His charm is that he is entirely without side, and the novel rewards him for it.
- Prudence Cowley (Tuppence): Fifth daughter of an archdeacon, ex-V.A.D., ex-van driver, ex-government clerk, and the engine of the book. Tuppence is the one who names the partnership, writes the advertisement, invents the cover stories and does the actual detecting, most of it from behind a door or under a maid’s cap. She is quick, theatrical, and much less sentimental than the men around her, and Christie gives her the best lines and the only proposal she turns down on grounds of sense.
- Mr. Brown: The antagonist who is never in the room. Mr. Brown is a name passed between servants and revolutionaries, a voice on a telephone, a signature on a note of condolence; his followers describe him as a fable, and the ones who claim to have met him cannot agree on what he looked like. Christie builds the whole conspiracy around a man defined by his ordinariness, so that the reader is looking for a face in a crowd of faces, which is exactly where he is.
- Jane Finn: The girl from the Lusitania and the still centre of the plot. Eighteen in 1915, alone on the ship, handed a packet she was told to keep, and then gone: listed as saved, traced to Ireland, and lost. When she finally appears she is thinner, quieter and more competent than anyone expects, and the most important thing about her is how little she says. Everything the conspirators do is an attempt to produce a Jane Finn of their own.
- Julius P. Hersheimmer: A millionaire from the Middle West, in London to find the cousin he has never met, and cheerfully prepared to buy the answer. Julius is the book’s comic American and its engine of money: he hires detectives, buys a Rolls-Royce outright rather than haggle, and proposes marriage before the case is half over. He is also, unexpectedly, the one who does the physical rescuing, with a Colt automatic he calls Little Willie.
- Sir James Peel Edgerton, K.C.: The most famous criminal lawyer in England, a Member of Parliament who has refused office, and a collector of criminology who knows more about the case than he is told. Sir James takes Tuppence seriously when nobody else does, gives her advice that sounds like a proverb and is actually a warning, and keeps appearing at the exact moment the plot needs a grown-up in the room. Christie uses him to ask what a very clever man does with his cleverness.
Core Literary Themes
- Amateurs against professionals: The book’s running joke and its real argument: the Intelligence officer has the files, the lawyer has the law, the millionaire has the money, and none of them can move without two people who have nothing. Tommy and Tuppence win because they are unimpressive — because a man in a shabby suit following you is not a man you report to Mr. Brown. Christie would spend forty years defending the amateur detective; this is the first book where she explains why he is necessary.
- Names as weapons: Almost every character is running under a name that is not theirs: Rita is Marguerite, the parlourmaid is a detective, the French servant is an English girl, the missing heiress is a nurse’s patient, and the villain is a colour. Christie makes identity a thing you can put on and take off, and the plot turns on the one name nobody can fake — Jane Finn’s — because too many people have tried.
- The year after the war: Demobilisation, the comb-out, strikes, profiteers, and a generation of young people who survived the war and cannot find work in the peace. Christie does not editorialise, but the book is soaked in the grievance of 1919: the feeling that the men who ran the war are still running everything, and that the people who came back are owed something nobody intends to pay.
- Conspiracy as a business: Mr. Brown’s organisation is not a secret society but a company: it has employees, wages, a newsletter of a kind, a plan to buy a newspaper and a budget for propaganda. Christie’s criminals are bureaucrats, and the horror is administrative — a union of the discontented, run on paper, capable of anything because nobody in it has to understand the whole.
- Partnership, not romance: The Tommy-and-Tuppence marriage begins as a limited company with a half-crown subscription, and the novel is careful to make the friendship older and more real than the proposals. Christie’s couples bicker, undercut each other and keep score; the effect is intimacy, and it is why she brought these two back four more times over the next half-century.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Secret Adversary?
Because the book is out of copyright in the United States and has been for decades, and the editions most people meet are transcriptions with the paragraphing flattened and the chapter breaks run together. This one is built from a single source — the Project Gutenberg text of 1922 — and then checked against the printed structure: a prologue, twenty-eight numbered chapters with their original titles, and the closing chapter, all present and in order, 78,347 words of it.
The file is made for reading rather than for hoarding. Chapter headings are real headings, so your reader can build a table of contents; paragraphs keep their indents and their breaks; the dialogue attribution, which in Christie is doing most of the work, is left exactly where she put it. There are no scans, no OCR debris, no missing page numbers at the foot of a chapter, and nothing has been modernised, abridged or annotated inside the text.
Three formats come out of the same source, so you can pick by device rather than by edition: EPUB for Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play and most phones; AZW3 for a Kindle you sideload to; KEPUB for a Kobo that wants its own layout engine. There is no DRM, no account, no newsletter, and no cost. The page also carries the summaries, the character list and the historical note, so you can read the book with the map in front of you or ignore all of it and start at the prologue.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #1155 — the complete text, prologue to the last chapter, checked chapter by chapter for gaps and dropped lines.
- Prologue and all twenty-eight chapters Including the long stretches adaptations cut: the meeting in the Soho house, the night watch in the South Audley Mansions flat, Tuppence’s week as a housemaid, and the Kent house with its “private patients”.
- Three formats, one text EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB generated from the same source file, so a sentence on page 40 of your Kobo is the same sentence on page 40 of your Kindle.
- No DRM, no account, no cost Download the file, put it on the device, read it. Public domain in the United States; check the law where you are.
- The Murder on the Links — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Big Four — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The Man in the Brown Suit — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The novel is a prologue and twenty-eight short chapters. The twelve entries below group them by movement, use Christie’s own chapter titles as labels, and stop where the clues stop — nothing here names the man behind Mr. Brown.
- Prologue · The Lusitania, 7 May 1915: Two torpedoes, twenty minutes, and a crowded boat deck. A man called Danvers finds an eighteen-year-old American girl, presses an oilskin packet into her hands, and gives her her instructions: keep it hidden, watch the personal column of the Times for a message beginning “Shipmate”, and if nothing comes in three days take it to the American Embassy. Then the water closes over the ship, and the prologue ends with her hand still holding the packet.
- Chapters I–III · The Young Adventurers, Ltd.: Outside the Dover Street tube station Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Cowley meet by accident, discover they are both broke and both bored, and invent a company on the spot. The wording is drafted between them: two young adventurers for hire, willing to do anything, go anywhere, pay must be good; Tuppence wants to add no reasonable offer refused, like flats and furniture, and Tommy’s reply that any offer they get will be a pretty unreasonable one turns it into no unreasonable offer refused. She expects the box to cost about five shillings and puts down half a crown for her share, and the advertisement produces a large clean-shaven man in a Lyons’ corner, a firm called the Esthonia Glassware Company, and an offer of a hundred pounds to go to Paris and be somebody’s ward for three months. Tuppence tries the name Jane Finn on him, and gets a reaction worth more than the money.
- Chapters IV–V · Who Is Jane Finn?: A second advertisement — any information respecting Jane Finn — brings two replies, and the first is a lean, tired-looking man in a house in Carshalton who turns out to be the Intelligence officer from Tommy’s old department. He tells them about the draft treaty, the messenger, the girl, and the criminal the files call Mr. Brown, then offers expenses and three hundred a year each. At the Ritz the other reply turns out to be a millionaire from the Middle West, Julius Hersheimmer, whose cousin Jane is the girl in question — and whose only photograph of her was collected that morning by a man calling himself Inspector Brown.
- Chapters VI–VII · A Plan of Campaign: The three of them pool what they have: a shipping-office list of Lusitania survivors with one name circled, a telephone number, and a face. They work through the survivors until they reach a Mrs. Vandemeyer of South Audley Mansions, whose maid calls her Marguerite and whose friends call her Rita. On the stairs Tuppence sees Whittington with a fair, weak-faced foreigner, and Tommy follows the pair across London: Whittington to a Bournemouth train, the foreigner to a cul-de-sac in Soho, where a particular knock gets you in and the doorkeeper tells you the second door on your left.
- Chapter VIII · The Adventures of Tommy: Behind a torn curtain in an upstairs room, Tommy watches the meeting assemble: a German with a naval beard in the chair, a Sinn Feiner, a Labour man, a small pale Russian everyone stands up for. They talk about money from America, a strike fixed for the 29th, a newspaper bought and paid for, a document that would make the Labour leaders declare a revolution, and a girl who knows where it is. Then the door opens behind him. Christie ends the chapter with a blow on the head and Tommy on the floor, which is the first time the book admits that its hero may not survive it.
- Chapters IX–X · Tuppence Enters Domestic Service: While Tommy is missing, Tuppence goes into service. She applies to Mrs. Vandemeyer as a house-parlourmaid with a forged reference from a parsonage in Wales, dyes her hair and alters her eyebrows, and spends her evenings listening at doors. Her new mistress is worth the disguise: pale gold hair, a gown of indigo charmeuse, and eyes of “a piercing electric blue” that seem to bore into the soul of whoever they rest on. The dinner guest is the fair foreigner from the Soho house, calling himself Count Stepanov; from the balcony she hears Mrs. Vandemeyer say that she takes her orders only from Mr. Brown. The next morning Sir James Peel Edgerton calls, recognises her as a hard-up V.A.D., and remarks that a change of place does no harm sometimes.
- Chapters XI–XII · Julius Tells a Story: Julius comes back from Bournemouth with a sprained ankle and a story about a house in the pine woods, a nurse, and a face he only saw from a tree. Tuppence tells him everything and they take it to Sir James, who listens, says he is already half in the case, and agrees to call on Mrs. Vandemeyer that night. Tuppence gets there first. She talks her way into the flat and is marched into the bedroom at the point of Mrs. Vandemeyer’s revolver; she turns the tables by throwing a glass of chloral in the older woman’s face and taking the gun off the washstand. Then she offers a hundred thousand pounds for the whereabouts of Jane Finn, and Mrs. Vandemeyer is on the edge of telling her when she looks over Tuppence’s shoulder, screams, and faints.
- Chapters XIII–XIV · The Vigil: They put her to bed and keep watch, and by morning she is dead. The doctor is inclined to call it heart failure and an accidental sleeping draught, but the bottle that was three parts full is empty, the safe has been gone through, and there are charred papers in the grate. The one useful thing they get is a name and a doctor: Dr. Hall of Bournemouth, who had in his care a young relative of Mrs. Vandemeyer’s, a girl taken off the Lusitania who remembers nothing whatever before the rescue — not her name, not her language, not her country. She left his nursing home a week ago, in the middle of the night, with a nurse.
- Chapters XV–XVII · Tuppence Receives a Proposal: Julius proposes, is turned down kindly, and is left with a note Tuppence writes and then thinks better of. Sir James goes fishing in Scotland with a parting warning: never tell all you know, not even to the person you know best. In Soho, Tommy is bargaining for his life — offering to find the papers in exchange for being let go — and being kept in a windowless room by two men and a French servant girl called Annette, who slips him an open penknife. The room has four crooked prints from Faust — Marguerite with her box of jewels, the church scene, Siebel and his flowers, and Faust and Mephistopheles — and one of them ends up in his hand as a weapon. He gets out through the attic with her help, reads in the morning paper that the Russian from the meeting is in London, and identifies his own chief suspect.
- Chapters XVIII–XIX · The Telegram: A telegram from Tommy sends Tuppence and Julius to Manchester, where a girl in bandages says she is Jane Finn: she remembers Danvers, the packet, and where she hid it before she was knocked on the head in a train. She gives them a place on the Welsh coast, a rock crevice, a gorse path and a boulder shaped like a begging terrier. It is the first time in the book that someone tells them something they can actually go and look at, and the reader is meant to notice how convenient that is.
- Chapters XX–XXII · Too Late: The crevice holds an oilskin packet, sewn up neatly, and the packet holds a blank sheet of paper. Warmed at a fire, the sheet produces brown handwriting and a message signed with Mr. Brown’s compliments. Then the newspapers arrive: a green hat and a coat with Tuppence’s initials have been washed up on the Yorkshire coast. Tommy reports to the Intelligence officer, who is not convinced the body is hers; a letter from Tommy, delivered late, asks that a sealed envelope not be opened until midnight on the 28th, and the last chapter of this group is a conversation in Downing Street about how little time is left.
- Chapters XXIII–XXVIII · A Race Against Time: The last six chapters are the book at full speed: a house in Kent that takes private patients, a butler with a familiar face, a song sung as a signal, and a rescue that is not done by the police. The song is “I am a Soldier”, a favourite on the gramophone in Tuppence’s hospital days; Tommy roars it with an unsteady gait and calls the butler “dear old whiskers” as two servants walk him off the drive — and the butler is Whittington. Christie allows that he had not a note of music in his voice, but his lungs were excellent. Tuppence’s warning note says she is being moved; Julius takes the initiative with a revolver and an unwilling guide; and the girl from the Lusitania finally sits down in a lawyer’s library and says what she did with the treaty, in the room and in front of the picture where she did it. The remaining chapters deliver the answer the whole book has been circling, and this page stops short of it.
The Secret Adversary: Frequently Asked Questions
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