N or M?
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Add to basket failed.
Please try again later
Add to wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Remove from wishlist failed.
Please try again later
Adding to library failed
Please try again
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
£0.00 for first 30 days
LIMITED TIME OFFER
Get 3 months for £0.99/mo
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.
N or M?
Narrated by:
Hugh Fraser
Buy Now for £12.99
-
Narrated by:
-
Hugh Fraser
-
By:
-
Agatha Christie
About this listen
Another audiobook in the Tommy & Tuppence series.
It is World War II, and while the RAF struggles to keep the Luftwaffe at bay, Britain faces an even more sinister threat from ‘the enemy within’ – Nazis posing as ordinary citizens.
With pressure mounting, the Intelligence service appoints two unlikely spies, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. Their mission: to seek out a man and a woman from among the colourful guests at Sans Souci, a seaside hotel. But this assignment is no stroll along the promenade. After all, N and M have just murdered Britain’s finest agent…
©1941 Agatha Christie Limited. A Chorion Company. All rights reserved; (P)2005 HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, London UKListeners also enjoyed...
Another great story from Christie's dynamic duo!
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
loved everything about it.
Agatha Christie as always Brilliant
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Lively tale, excellently read
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I’m afraid when Ms Christie gets into espionage plots they become so convoluted and unlikely that I’m always left feeling if this was the best the Nazis could do the only wonder is they didn’t lose more quickly! But I don’t care – Tommy and Tuppence, especially Tuppence, are so much fun to spend time with that the plot can be as silly as it likes and I’ll still love the book! And there’s so much in it about the anxieties that would have been forefront in the minds of people on the Home Front that I expect it didn’t seem nearly so unbelievable when it was published in 1941 – Fifth Columnists, parachuting spies, those perfidious Irish, Nazi sympathisers, German refugees who might be spies… and all while Britain was standing alone against the mighty Nazi war machine, and victory was far from certain. As would have been the case for so many people too old to serve, Tommy and Tuppence’s two children – adults now – are in the forces, and both doing jobs requiring a lot of secrecy so that their parents don’t even know where they are much of the time. It’s partly to take their minds off this constant worry that makes them both so keen to be doing something – anything – to help.
The boarding house is filled with a variety of characters who all look innocent enough, but equally could all be N or M. There’s the retired military man who seems to despair of democratic Britain and feels the Nazis are doing quite a good job of running Germany – but is he really a Nazi sympathiser or just a grumpy old man? Is the Irishwoman loyal to Britain despite her husband’s Irish nationalism during WW1? Is the young German really a refugee from a regime he hates, or is he an infiltrator? What about the hypochondriacal man and his put-upon wife – are they what they seem? Surely the mother evacuated from London with her young child must be just what she claims? That was what made the idea of the Fifth Column so frightening – once you accept the idea as possible, then anyone could be a Nazi spy. And so every careless word could lead to death or disaster for our troops. Christie captures this feeling of paranoia very well.
Despite all this serious stuff, there’s also enough humour in it to stop the tone from becoming too dark. The banter between Tommy and Tuppence is always entertaining, and here there's an added element in that we see how their children treat them as if they were ancient and past it, while Tommy and Tuppence in reality are doing a far more important and secret job than either of them. Albert makes an appearance, and while it’s always fun to see him, sadly he follows in the tradition of Lord Wimsey’s Bunter or Campion’s Lugg – the comedy working class character who adores and idolises his master or mistress. Albert actually refers to Tommy as his master, for goodness sake! So I’m glad he plays a fairly minor role, and am devoutly thankful that neither Poirot nor Miss Marple saw the need for a working class sidekick.
Hugh Fraser is as wonderful as always. Here he gets the chance to play loads of different characters, from grumpy old men to beautiful, moody young women, not to mention the toddler who speaks mostly in baby language and gurgles, and he handles them all brilliantly! So, despite my niggles with the plot, this is a hugely enjoyable listening experience, and Tommy and Tuppence are as much fun as ever!
Careless talk costs lives…
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Hugh Fraser performs Christie very well and brings new life to the old tired stories. I certainly wouldn’t read them again- so many books I want to read before I die! - but listening is another matter. Like a child I like familiar predictable (not the villain, the format!) tales at bedtime.
For once Christie seems to take a war seriously in this book, although in later novels it goes back to being some sort of good clean fun, like shooting lots of big game and despising anyone who isn’t English, and even most of her compatriots.
I like Tuppence, who isn’t wet like most of Christie’s women, the married or marriageable ones, anyway. I like the repartee between the Beresfords, but found it a bit callous in the first book. A defence mechanism, no doubt, in the aftermath of the Great War, but still jarring - my grandfathers and their peers didn’t think of WWI as even faintly amusing- and there’s not much shallow laughter reconstructing a life in 1918 minus most of one leg if you were from a peasant background.
This book was first published in 1941, set in 1940, when WWII wasn’t going too well - France had fallen and the UK & Commonwealth was alone. Germany and the USSR were still in alliance and Japan hadn’t forced the USA to take part.
As is well known, many powerful or aristocratic people had favoured Hitler before the war (the Daily Mail was a potent influence on the Fascist side till the outbreak of war) and many quietly or not so quietly continued to think he was a really good guy...Had he conquered the UK, he’d certainly have found stout collaborators, in high places, just as in France and elsewhere so there’s no reason to feel superior as nations to those who were under Nazi rule.
The fear of “fifth columnists” was justified, though exaggerated in the popular mind (bearded nuns, clergy - RC of course - anyone with Irish or other ancestry not the “right” sort of Anglo-Saxon!)
Christie manages to be less xenophobic in this novel written in times of extreme national danger than in most of her œuvre. She isn’t nasty about Jews, doesn’t lambast the occupied countries for their lack of true Anglo-Saxon grit, even considers the “lower orders” in the war effort as worthy citizens.
I can well understand that she was investigated briefly by MI5, after calling one of the suspected traitors “Major Bletchley”, shortly after she talks about those working on ciphers and de-coding as inclined to madness. As the book was published first in the USA, it was probably too late to eradicate this “innocent” nomenclature without revealing that “Bletchley” was TOP TOP SECRET! (Was it just a coincidence? Another Christie “enigma”?)
Old friend revisited
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.