Tommy and Tuppence

Tommy and Tuppence Beresford are fictional detectives in the work of Agatha Christie. Their full names are Thomas Beresford and Prudence Beresford (née Cowley). First introduced in Christie's second novel, The Secret Adversary, Tommy and Tuppence became standards in the Christie canon, appearing in four novels and a short story collection.

Overview
When Tommy and Tuppence first appear in 1922, they are both unemployed and looking for work after the end of WWI. Struggling for work after the war was something Christie had experience of first-hand and finding a new sense of purpose was a common plight for the upper middle class of their generation. Tuppence appears as a charismatic, impulsive and intuitive person, while Tommy is less imaginative, and less likely to be diverted from the truth, "he is not clever, but it is hard to blind his eyes to the facts." They therefore make a good team, complimenting each other well and balancing one another out. It is in this first book The Secret Adversary that they meet up after the war, and come to realise that, although they have been friends for most of their lives, they have now fallen in love with each other.

Christie often used the Beresfords to experiment with thrillers, playing with and often parodying the genre. The short story collection Partners in Crime takes this to an extreme; each case is solved in the vein of a different famous literary detective, including a certain Belgian.

Unlike many other recurring detective characters, including the better known Christie detectives, Tommy and Tuppence aged in time with the real world, being in their early twenties in The Secret Adversary and in their seventies in Postern of Fate, their final appearance. In their early appearances, they are portrayed as typical upper middle class "bright young things" of the 1920s, and the stories and settings have a more pronounced period-specific flavour than the stories featuring the better known Christie characters. As they age, they're revealed to have raised three children - twins Deborah and Derek and an adopted daughter, Betty. Throughout the series they employ a man named Albert, who first appears as a lift boy who helps them in The Secret Adversary, and in Partners in Crime  becomes their hapless assistant at a private detective agency; by Postern of Fate  he has become their butler and has been married and widowed.

List of Appearances
Novels

Television
Tommy and Tuppence's most bountiful appearances to date have been on television. Two series' have been made featuring the characters, as well as an episode of Agatha Christie's Marple being an adaptation of a Tommy and Tuppence novel.