Partners in Crime: An Agatha Christie adaptation for a modern-ish age

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There's been a revival of interest in the culture of postwar Britain lately, from the TV series The Bletchley Circle and The Hour to the later seasons of Foyle's War. Add to those the BBC's reboot of Partners in Crime, a new series about the exploits of Agatha Christie's lesser-known but beloved amateur detectives Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, which premieres in Canada this week on the eve of celebrations of Christie's 125th birthday.

"I loved the dynamic of the husband-and-wife detective duo and I thought that hadn't been done in a long time," comedian David Walliams, who plays Tommy, says over the phone from London. He's also an executive producer on the series and approached the Christie estate with the idea of a revival five years ago. "It's hard to relate to the supersleuth, brilliant as all those shows are – Sherlock Holmes and such." Instead, he adds, more people can relate to an ordinary couple trying to solve crimes together. "And I thought there would be some humour in that dynamic as well."

The 21 stories (four novels, 17 short stories) about the adventuresome duo are lighter, breezier fare than Christie's Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot or even Parker Pyne stories. They were first created by the author and featured in 1922's The Secret Adversary – her second published book after Poirot's debut in 1920's The Mysterious Affair at Styles – and she fondly continued to write Tommy and Tuppence stories throughout her career, aging them in real time. They are even the subject of her final novel, 1973's Postern of Fate. The pair were soon followed by similarly feisty amateur sleuth couples like Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, and came a decade before Dashiell Hammett's Nick and Nora Charles, let alone eighties fare Hart to Hart and Moonlighting.

The new production was encouraged to interpret what Christie had written, up to a point – the pair's original back story, for example, is that Tommy worked for British intelligence, which has been changed for the series. Instead, there's an emphasis on his haplessness, particularly relative to his wife Tuppence (played by Jessica Raine, of Call the Midwife). Tommy is not a fool, but he isn't the brains of the operation either. The self-described "pipe and slippers man" is in fact rather oblivious at first – he's described in the one book as having no imagination, whereas Tuppence is assertive, "more intuition and less common sense." He frequently makes tea, while she can't tell a soup from a dessert spoon, and is the one who wears the trousers and reads the newspaper for clues.

"It's not interesting to me to play a straightforward heroic character, and I don't think that the public would necessarily accept me as one," Walliams says. "But I thought I could play a rather reluctant hero."

Partners in Crime sets the couple in the period of burgeoning interest in spy culture, around 1952 (when Casino Royale, Ian Fleming's first Bond novel was written; Adversary's original espionage plot predates it by 30 years). As Walliams points out, unlike the detective stories most people know Christie for, the series' first two cases (The Secret Adversary and N or M?) are spy story action-thrillers. Tuppence is an avid reader of these fictions, name-checking John Buchan and other authors in conversation.

"We wanted to make the setting a bit closer to the audience, in the beginning of the Cold War," Walliams says, "because when you read Secret Adversary, the starting point is the sinking of the Lusitania." What also resonates today is that, "post 9/11, people all over the world are trying to fight an idea, and that's complex and hard to do – you don't know who your perceived enemy is. [The Cold War] is not dissimilar to that period, with the threat of Russia or that paranoia even in the movies that came out of that era, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

The reboot also starts with Tommy and Tuppence already a few years married. "They're thawed, and they want a bit of adventure and excitement. It's an interesting place to be," Walliams says. The possibilities of riffing on domestic tensions between an affectionate but bantering romantic couple also hits on Christie's slyly satirical streak. The new series takes its name from a 1929 short-story collection about the duo's further adventures; Christie wrote each tale as a pastiche of another popular detective writer's style or hero – including sending up her own Poirot. "She's got quite a devilish sense of humour," Walliams says. "She knows she's stepping into forbidden, delicious territory at times."

Walliams himself appeared in a Miss Marple a decade ago, but his very first Christie experience was the 1974 film of Murder on the Orient Express at around age eight or ten. It stayed with him. "It's very chilling – the starting point is that a child has been kidnapped and killed. A child is why there is this revenge plot. Sometimes people think Agatha Christie is quite light and they think about country houses and people drinking tea and everything being polite, but often there is something rather nasty and creepy at the heart of her stories. It's lovely, isn't it," he says with a laugh, "a very sweet old lady, a rather posh old lady with a nasty imagination who could dream up these terrible crimes and solve them."

With every episode, Tommy hatches a new plan to make their fortune via an improbable business scheme – first beekeeping, then wigs, and from the very first cases in the series, the couple don disguises. There is humour, but there will be no broad comedy or sending up. And there will definitely be no drag of the sort performed on Walliams' sketch shows Little Britain, Come Fly With Me or even Britain's Got Talent, where the comedian has been known to don lippy and frock and taunt fellow judge Simon Cowell. So while it would be satisfying to see Walliams as an underestimated old auntie, if viewers want to see any of that, they'll simply have to watch Miss Marple.

Partners in Crime: The Secret Adversary premieres Sept. 3 on Acorn.TV, followed by broadcast on Bravo in late October.