For some reason, I've always felt a slight antipathy toward Agatha Christie's Tommy and Tuppence novels. While the mysteries starring Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple always seemed interesting and worth reading, whenever I picked up a Tommy and Tuppence one, I always seemed to put it down again right away. When it came to Partners in Crime, the television series adapted from Christie's novels featuring these characters, I took a determined approach to put aside all previous associations and take the series on its own merit. Unfortunately, I ended up having exactly the same reaction as to the novels. I could sit through the episodes, but I certainly didn't find them particularly entertaining.

The Tommy and Tuppence stories are essentially humorous, with a consistently light tone and slightly over the top acting; plot is secondary. This is all very well in theory, but in practice it just doesn't come together for me. It's not that I prefer my mysteries to be deadly serious; in fact, I find the humorous elements in the Poirot series to be highly entertaining. It's just that in the Tommy and Tuppence stories, I felt that the actual mystery plots were not particularly well developed. Even in "The Secret Adversary," which with its longer running time (an hour and forty-five minutes) had more opportunity to develop an interesting story, there are a number of weak links in the plot. Actually, there's probably some justification for problems in the plot of "The Secret Adversary"; the novel of the same name that it was based on was only Christie's second novel, published in 1922.

As with other BBC adaptations of Agatha Christie's work, the Tommy and Tuppence stories presented in Partners in Crime appear to be quite faithful to the original sources (The Secret Adversary and the collection of short stories also titled Partners in Crime). Unfortunately, here this turns out to be a liability rather than a plus: the stories in Partners in Crime are parodies of detective stories that would have been known to 1920s readers, with Tommy and Tuppence parodying a different author's stories in each episode.

Humor tends to age badly, and parody more so. Given that modern viewers are unlikely in the extreme to have even heard of authors like Herbert Jenkins, R. Austin Freeman, Isabel Ostrander, and Anthony Berkeley, they will have no cultural background to appreciate the parodies of these authors. All that's left is a light and rather silly framework for rather lackluster mysteries.

The Partners in Crime collection features five episodes: the longer introductory "The Secret Adversary," and the shorter, fifty-minute episodes "The Affair of the Pink Pearl," "The House of Lurking Death," "Finessing the King," and "The Clergyman's Daughter."

The DVD

Video

All the episodes in Partners in Crime are presented in their original 1.33:1 aspect ratio. The overall image quality for this 1980 series is merely average. It's watchable, and has no glaring problems, but it doesn't look particularly good. Overall, the image is fairly washed out, with colors looking rather bland. Edge enhancement is distinctly evident, and a number of print flaws appear in the image as well. A few times, I noticed colored haloes on the edges of some objects. As seems to be the case in many BBC television shows, any footage shot outdoors looks terrible: grainy, noisy, and in general much worse than the indoor shots, which fortunately account for most of the episodes.

Audio

The Dolby 2.0 soundtrack is satisfactory. The chipper 1920s-style music is balanced well with the rest of the track, and dialogue is reasonably clean and clear. No background noise is evident.

Extras

The Partners in Crime set consists of two DVDs, in individual keepcases, enclosed in a glossy paper slipcase. There really isn't much by way of special features: just cast filmographies, information on Agatha Christie, and a trivia quiz.

Final thoughts

Partners in Crime is strictly for the most completionist of Agatha Christie fans, or for those who have read the Tommy and Tuppence novels and stories and find them entertaining. As for me, despite the fact that I have enjoyed the Poirot adaptations immensely, I found Partners in Crime to be quite forgettable. I would recommend it merely as a rental.