The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie

The Lusitania was sinking after being struck by two torpedoes. A man approached the young American Jane Finn and asked her if she would take papers which were important to the war effort which had to be saved. He did this because he believed that women would be saved first from the sinking ship. He told her that if he survived he would contact her. If he did not, she should contact the American embassy. Jane Finn and the papers were not seen again.

Now the war is over. Prudence Cowley know by her friends as Tuppence encounters her old friend Tommy Beresford on a London Street. Both had just been demobbed, both were young, and both were looking for a job. They put there heads together and came up with the idea of joining forces to become the Young Adventurers who would take any job as long as the pay was good.  They would put an advertisement in the paper. Tommy mentioned the strange ads he had read, and the strange name of Jane Finn that he had just overheard two men talking about.

A man in the tea shop where they were talking overheard them and approached Tuppence on the street. He suggested that she come to his office, and discuss doing a job for him. Tuppence did so, and when asked her name thought it a good idea to have a pseudonym and gave the name Jane Finn. This name set the man, Mr. Wittington,  off in a rage. He suspected that Tuppence knew far more than she was telling him. He paid her fifty pounds and they agreed to meet the next day. However, the next day, he had disappeared.

This is the way that Tommy and Tuppence's adventure began. They placed an ad in the newspaper seeking information on Jane Finn. They got one reply from Mr. Carter who seemed to represent a British government department seeking information about Jane Finn.  They also got a reply from Julius P. Hersheimmer, a young American millionaire who said that Jane Finn was his cousin, and that he had come to England to find her.

Their search for Jane Finn would place Tommy and Tuppence in a great deal of danger as they found out that the papers Jane had would be very dangerous to the future of the English government if they fell into the hands of a mysterious Mr. Brown who was plotting a Communist conspiracy to attack the government and call a general strike of workers. Tommy and Tuppence received help in their efforts from Mr. Carter and Julius Hersheimmer, and also from a very distinguished and well known lawyer, Sir James Peel Edgerton, who some thought would some day become prime minister.

This book is a fun read, though there are several clues along the way to the real identity of the mysterious Mr. Brown which should enable the reader to solve this mystery before Tommy and Tuppence do. The book was published in 1922, and thus a very early Christie. It is the first of the Tommy and Tuppence series. A recent adaptation (2015) of The Secret Adversary is now streaming on Acorn TV. It has been updated to after World War II, and bears some faint resemblance to the original novel.

Greenmask by Jefferson Farjeon

John Letherton was a man who believed that there was magic in life. He, however, had never experienced it. He was now on the train on his way to Wales for a walking holiday. He was joined in his compartment by a good looking but rather "common" woman with black hair and good legs by the name of Daisy Vail. They had a nice chat, and John was quite surprised that she got off the train at Dolberis which was his destination. She was met by a car at the station, while John needed to walk.

Dolberis was a lovely town surrounded by mountains, however, John decided that he did not wish to stay in the town, but to seek lodgings farther out of the town. He started walking and eventually found what appeared to be a hotel called the White Lion. When he tried to get a room, it was evident that the manager did not want him to stay there. Then Daisy Vail showed up. It was apparent that she was staying there, and she told the manager that the room next to hers was vacant, and so he got that room. When John went down for dinner, it seemed that the other guests were a very strange and unfriendly lot. He was told that the occupant of room 9 was seriously ill, but when John took a peek in the room after dinner, he found that it was empty.  Later in the evening, as John was walking along a bridge near the hotel, somebody tried to push him over the edge. Daisy Vail found him, brought him his knapsack and told him to get away from there and to go back to the town of Dolberis.

John got away but not to Dolberis. Instead he headed off into the woods in the dark of night. He eventually grew tired and went to sleep in the woods where he was found by Robert Gill, a kindly and pudgy elderly man. Gill told John that he had always wanted to live in a castle, and now he had the money to rent one for the summer. Gill invited John to come and stay at the castle. There John learned that Gill had trouble keeping servants because it was believed that the ghost of a highwayman, Greenmask, haunted the castle and the servants left after seeing the ghost. Mrs. Gill was also visibly upset by Greenmask. The only dependable servants remaining were Benson, the butler, and Ruth his daughter.

John and Gill discovered the bodies of two of the servants in the nearby river, but could not report the crime to the police because the phone line at the castle had been cut, and Gill's car had been put out of commission. Then two of the people from the mysterious White Lion hotel showed up at the castle and applied for the servants' positions. John found himself in the midst of a very ominous mystery involving both dead bodies and a ghost.

This book is set in a very lovely and remote part of Wales. The isolation of the setting adds to the ominous story. The book is full of suspicious people, both at the White Lion and at the castle. Indeed as the story progressed, I began to suspect everybody of being in some illegal conspiracy even though I didn't exactly know what that conspiracy was. It was a thoroughly enjoyable read.

J. Jefferson Farjeon is one of the overlooked writers of the Golden Age of the mystery, but he is finding new readers as the British Library is republishing some of his books. Greenmask was published in 1944 and only used copies seem to be available.

In the Teeth of the Evidence by Dorothy Sayers

This is a collection of short stories by Dorothy Sayers which was published in 1940. It contains two Lord Peter Wimsey stories, five Montague Egg stories and ten stories classified as "other".

I am rather fond on Montague Egg, the traveling salesman for the firm of Plummett & Rose, suppliers of wines and fine spirits and liqueurs. He tends to find crimes as he travels and follows the very good advice which he receives from The Salesman's Handbook such as "Attend to details and you'll make your sale" in solving them. Among other things, Montague investigates a very hirsute professor who is an author of a book on the history of the Christian Church, a torn scrap of paper which might be linked to a murder, and assists the police in the solution of another murder case involving the death of another traveling salesman.

The "other" stories include a impoverished barber who sees that a reward is being offered for information on a criminal, and believes that he will never see this person. Another involves a milkman who becomes worried when nobody takes the milk bottles inside the door after his deliveries. Then there is the playwright whose play is successful but hates the producer for altering his script. Sayers was probably quite sympathetic in the story about an unpublished writer who thinks up an extremely clever way to promote his book with a potential publisher.  

Of course, you are wondering about the title of the book. This is the title of the Lord Peter Wimsey story in which Lord Peter is told a story about a suspicious death while being treated by his dentist. The corpse was badly burned and the identification of the body hinges on its teeth.

I found all the stories in this book to be very enjoyable. This book is currently available in ebook format.