Agatha Christie's Rarely-Adapted Tommy and Tuppence Series is Now a Show
And it's set in the present day.
Feature image credit: Nick Wall via Variety
Agatha Christie fans, rejoice! Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence series has a new adaptation!
This series of Christie’s features two of her lesser-known detective protagonists, the young married couple Tommy and Prudence “Tuppence” Beresford. The two appeared in five books across Christie’s career, starting with The Secret Adversary in 1922. The others are the 1929 short story collection Partners in Crime, the 1941 novel N or M?, the 1968 novel By the Pricking of My Thumbs, and the last full novel she ever wrote, 1973’s Postern of Fate. The couple ages in real time; they’re in their twenties in The Secret Adversary and in their seventies in Postern of Fate, but they are eternally youthful. They both love adventure and fun, even though they are complete opposites (Tuppence is perky and impulsive, while Tommy is very by-the-book).
The characters have been brought to life a few times, notably in two miniseries adaptations of Partners in Crime, one from 1983-1984, and one from 2015 that changed the time period from the roaring 20s to the Cold War 50s.
The new adaptation is the first contemporary-set adaptation of any of Christie’s works. (I wonder if this is a trend. Last year’s Maigret series for Masterpiece! also brought the character into the present-day.) Filmed in 2025, it stars Antonia Thomas and Josh Dylan as the sleuths-in-love. The six-episode series is now available to watch on BritBox.
Olivia Rutigliano
Olivia Rutigliano is an Editor at Lit Hub and CrimeReads. Her other work appears in Vanity Fair, Vulture, Lapham's Quarterly, AirMail, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Baffler, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Politics/Letters, The Toast, Truly Adventurous, and elsewhere. She has a PhD from the departments of English/comparative literature and theatre at Columbia University, where she was the Marion E. Ponsford fellow. She hosts the podcasst "Culture Schlock" at Lit Hub Radio. She is on instagram at @oldebean, twitter at @oldrutigliano, and bluesky at @oliviarutigliano.bsky.social.
