The Postern of Fate

 First, no, I did not know what a postern was. It is a small gate or entrance. It is (British) famous from a British poem by James Elroy Flecker, The Gates of Damascus. It is not integral to the book, but I think it references actions that happened long ago and still sneak into our lives.

It is an odd book for Agatha Christie. (I'll explain why this matters later.) It is a mystery set in the 1970s, but the mystery is from before WWI. It was written in 1973 and features Tommy and Tuppence, now old and retired. And it is an investigation that isn't "solved" in the traditional mystery sense. T&T get some clues about what happened, but ultimately an old British master spy simply explains what happened to the pair. Tommy and Tuppence are as lost in the fog as we are until Colonel McSmoker just tells them at the end. 

It was Agatha Christie's last book written, but not the last published. I think the book where either Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot solves the crime and dies was the last one published.

Parts of Postern of Fate were very odd. It seems (to me) that the book's point was to warn people in the 1970s of the fallacy of forgetting Fascism. Really - I am not just reading through anti-Trump glasses. It refers to how forgetting what happened in WWI helped Britain to miss what happened to make Germany and Italy fascists in WWII. And how (really) Britain entered the EU was helpful.

I may or may not be reading too much into it, but she might have written it because of the British Secrets Act. The Secrets Act held that most state secrets were held for 30 years. The status of the code-breaking at Bletchley Park was admitted in 1974 - a year later after this book was written.

Miss Christie had been investigated in connection to Bletchley Park in the 1940s. It seemed to me that this book went some way to explain why people did what they did at that time. And, in fact, concerns a female German agent in the time right before WWI, that was actually a British agent.

I don't know if Christie was a spy or if she was afraid of being mentioned as having been investigated, but that is what it seemed to me. It is much less a mystery investigation and much more an explanatory book about what happened at the time.

Odd.