All you need to know about Tommy and Tuppence

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With the news that Tommy and Tuppence are going to be portrayed in a new BBC series starring David Walliams, here are some facts on the detective duo in question. 

The characters of Tommy Beresford and Prudence "Tuppence" Cowley first appeared in Agatha Christie's second novel The Secret Adversary in 1922. They had previously met each other, but were reunited at a tube station at the start of the novel. In that novel, they worked together as spies, trying to find the identity of a rogue agent Mr Brown and save a girl from kidnapping. At the end, they marry.

In 1924, they returned in a series of short stories called Partners in Crime, where the newlyweds start their own detective agency. They solve murders, mysteries, jewel thefts and a case of forged bank notes. In their second novel N or M?, an older Tommy and Tuppence are once again employed by MI5 to find two Nazi agents known as N and M. By then they have two grown up children: Derek and Deborah, but at the end of the novel they adopt a girl.

About twenty years later, in 1968, Agatha Christie wrote By The Pricking of my Thumbs, where an elderly Tommy and Tuppence solve a murder connected to an old people's home and a dangerous serial killer. Their last novel is The Postern of Fate, first published in 1973, where the retired sleuths investigate a past case and the ghosts of their house.

They have been portrayed on TV twice. Once in the 1980's in the series Partner's in Crime. James Warwick and Francesca Annis starred as the duo in ten hour-long episodes and one feature-length film. They were also played by Anthony Andrews and Greta Scacchi in a Marple adaption of By The Pricking of my Thumbs, alongside Geraldine McEwan as Miss Marple.

David Walliams is due to play the role of Tommy in a new Partners in Crime series coming in 2015.  The role of Tuppence has not yet been cast.