Title: Quite dynamic. Taken with this vintage cover, it kind of looks like they're the ones committing the crimes, which isn't generally the case. Actually, I'm not at all sure what's going on in this cover picture. Why is the dog there? Why is there some kind of shadow monster involved? Mysterious.
Plot: Tommy is "more or less in the Secret Service now, but it's pure office work", according to his wife. Tuppence, meanwhile, unsuited to the role of housewife, yearns for something exciting to happen. ("This craving for vulgar sensation alarms me," observes Tommy reprovingly.) Something exciting does indeed happen, when they more or less accidentally take over a detective agency, Blunt's Brilliant Detectives. (Really it's at the behest of Tommy's boss at MI5 or wherever, and there's an overarching plot which is something to do with Russians and the number 16. I'm still not entirely sure what that was all about.)
Anyway, the T's, together with Albert as office boy, are soon installed in "a somewhat dilapidated building in Bloomsbury", ready to undertake any private detective business that comes through the door while waiting for the number 16 thing to happen.
Tommy decides, for amusement, to model himself on a succession of famous fictional detectives; most of these are long forgotten (Thornley Colton? the Okewood brothers? anyone?), although both Sherlock Holmes and a certain M. Hercule Poirot (and his little grey cells) get a mention. I've definitely heard of them.
The investigations range from murder to the rather less lethal - a man trying to track down his fiancée, another trying to solve his girlfriend's challenge of figuring out how she could have been in two places at one time. (The solution is... disappointing.) Ultimately the number 16 stuff comes to fruition, with danger on all sides. And it ends with the promise of a new chapter in the life of Mr and Mrs Beresford.
Americans with silly names: Mrs Cortlandt Van Snyder of Detroit. (Russians with silly names: Prince Vladiroffsky.)
Acceptable in the 20s? I didn't notice any issues - at least, not in the cheap modern e-book edition I have. It's always possible it's been bowdlerised, though.
Verdict: I was looking forward to this - short stories make a change, and I know they're not everyone's cup of tea but personally I find Tommy and Tuppence quite fun. I like their sparky dialogue. However, I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would - the stories are very inconsequential, and nothing that happened really stuck in my mind.
There is some fun dialogue, though - I liked this exchange between Tuppence and a young woman, Monica, who the agency helps- I'm not sure Tuppence is entirely correct, but it does seem to happen a lot in the fiction of the time!
"Well - there are two men who - who - want to marry me." [said Monica]
"The usual story, I suppose? One rich, one poor, and the poor one is the one you like!"
"I don't know how you know all these things," murmured the girl.
"That's a sort of law of Nature," explained Tuppence. "It happens to everybody. It happened to me."
Next up: The Mysterious Mr Quin. This should be intriguing...
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