'The Secret Adversary, The Companion Edition' Presents Christie's First Thriller in the Original 1922 Text, the First Tommy & Tuppence Book, with Thirty Discussion Questions Fenced So the Adversary Stays Hidden

NEW YORK, Oct. 31, 2026

In January 1922, The Bodley Head of London published the second novel of a thirty-one-year-old English writer whose first book had introduced a Belgian detective. The Secret Adversary was something new: not a whodunit but a thriller, and the first appearance of the two leads Agatha Christie would return to for fifty years. On the afternoon of 7 May 1915, aboard the sinking Lusitania, a hunted messenger presses a secret draft treaty into the hands of a young American passenger, Jane Finn, who then vanishes with it. Years later, in post-war London, two broke young people, demobilised Tommy Beresford and wartime nurse Prudence "Tuppence" Cowley, advertise themselves as The Young Adventurers, Ltd., and are hired into the hunt for the girl, the treaty, and the master criminal behind the conspiracy, a man known even to his own followers only as "Mr Brown." Dodd, Mead and Company issued the US edition the same year. A new Companion Classics edition, The Secret Adversary, The Companion Edition, presents the complete novel, 74,977 words, Prologue plus twenty-eight chapters, unabridged, in the text of that 1922 first publication, taken from Project Gutenberg eBook #1155 and collated against Internet Archive scans of the 1922 Dodd, Mead text line: a photographic scan of the 1922 Dodd, Mead printing and a reprint transmitting the same text, against which a 174-probe test across the whole book matched at 90.2%, with no substantive omission, addition, or reordering found and no readings changed.

The adventure itself is the young Christie's discovery of pace: a tea-shop reunion and an impertinent advertisement; an offer of easy money that smells wrong; a name overheard and spoken aloud at exactly the wrong, or right, moment; a house in Soho; a millionaire cousin, Julius P. Hersheimmer, who has crossed an ocean to find Jane Finn; the great lawyer Sir James Peel Edgerton, whose hobby is crime; kidnappings, vigils, a telegram, and a final race against time that runs all the way to Downing Street. Over it all stands the adversary who is never seen taking the leading part, of whom the book's authorities warn that he always plays a secondary role, and that afterwards there is always some nonentity, a servant or a clerk, who was never noticed at all. This edition keeps that secret under the strictest fence in the series: the adversary's identity is named or hinted nowhere in the companion material, the kit, or any copy for the edition, outside the novel's own final chapters.

Around the novel, the companion material, all of it original to this edition, includes an introduction on Christie in 1922, the second novel that became her first thriller, and the fifty-year partnership it launched; a Who's Who of the hunt for Jane Finn; four explainers, covering the Lusitania and the draft treaty; London after the war, demobbed, broke, and advertising for adventure; the machinery of pursuit, from intelligence briefings to lift-boy amateurs; and money, rank, and address in 1922; a short life of Agatha Christie; an honest note on the period text; a reading schedule; and thirty discussion questions in four spoiler-fenced meetings plus a whole-book set.

Alongside the book, The Secret Adversary, Book Club Kit offers the edition's discussion material as a printable PDF (26 pages, US Letter) for reading groups: the four-meeting plan, the Who's Who and explainers, all thirty questions arranged by meeting, and the kit's signature activity, The Young Adventurers Ltd. Case File, three worksheets, the Treaty Trail, the Girl on the Lusitania, and the Suspect Board, that a group keeps meeting by meeting, with every "what it meant" column deliberately left blank until the final meeting; the kit carries no answer key, so nothing in it can spoil the book. The kit is available for $7 through the editor's Payhip store: https://payhip.com/horaceharriottjr

The Secret Adversary, The Companion Edition is available now as an eBook ($9.99) through Payhip: https://payhip.com/horaceharriottjr, and in The Classics and Companions Shop on the editor's Linktree. Print editions follow on Amazon (paperback, $14.99; hardcover, $24.99; Kindle, $9.99). The novel's text is public domain in the United States (first published in 1922; Agatha Christie died in 1976, so the novel remains in copyright in life-plus-seventy countries until 2047, and this edition is published for the United States first, with no non-US marketplace plans). No illustrations are reproduced or claimed; the cover is an original painting made for this edition. All companion material is original to this edition. This is an independent publication, not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by the Christie estate or any rights holder.

About the editor

Horace Harriott Jr. is a New York-based author and editor of more than two dozen books, including The Side Hustle Handbook, Master Playbook and The Ultimate Commissary Cookbook. This edition is part of his Companion Classics series of reading-together editions of public-domain classics.

About the book

The Secret Adversary, The Companion Edition, Agatha Christie (author), Horace Harriott Jr. (editor). Companion Classics, independently published, October 2026. Text: the first publication (The Bodley Head, London, January 1922; Dodd, Mead and Company, New York, 1922), via Project Gutenberg eBook #1155, collated against Internet Archive scans of the 1922 Dodd, Mead text line; Prologue + 28 chapters; 74,977 words; interior proof 340 pages, 6 x 9 in.