Name: The Secret Adversary
ISBN: 9781434614483

The Secret Adversary

Tommy Beresford and Prudence 'Tuppence' Cowley are young, in love… and flat broke. Just after Great War, there are few jobs available and the couple are desperately short of money. Restless for excitement, they decide to embark on a daring business scheme: Young Adventurers Ltd.—"willing to do anything, go anywhere." Hiring themselves out proves to be a smart move for the couple. In their first assignment for the mysterious Mr. Whittingtont, all Tuppence has to do in their first job is take an all-expense paid trip to Paris and pose as an American named Jane Finn. But with the assignment comes a bribe to keep quiet, a threat to her life, and the disappearance of her new employer. Now their newest job are playing detective. Where is the real Jane Finn? The mere mention of her name produces a very strange reaction all over London. So strange, in fact, that they decided to find this mysterious missing lady. She has been missing for five years. And neither her body nor the secret documents she was carrying have ever been found. Now post-war England's economic recovery depends on finding her and getting the papers back. But he two young working undercover for the British ministry know only that her name and the only photo of her is in the hands of her rich American cousin. It isn’t long before they find themselves plunged into more danger than they ever could have imagined—a danger that could put an abrupt end to their business… and their lives.

What Hacker News says

JiroApr 2026

I asked three things. I asked it about Father Coughlin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin) and it didn't mention that he was a radio broadcaster and claimed he was from Ireland. This may have been a complete hallucination, but I can't prove it, and I don't know how well known Coughlin was in 1930. I asked him about https://www.openculture.com/2013/12/ladies-home-journal-publ... and it hallucinated a text from Harper's in 1909. I asked it about the Lost World (1925 silent film based on the Arthur Conan Doyle book) and it hallucinated a film from 1923 that takes place in the Antarctic.

Me: Then why have I seen a film from 1925 by Arthur Conan Doyle that takes place in South America, and not a film from 1923that takes place in the Antarctic?

Talkie: Because your informant confused the films "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" and "The Lost World".

I then asked it:

Me: Tell me what books were written by Agatha Christie.

Talkie: Agatha Christie wrote "The Mystery of Choice", "The Secret Adversary", "The Man in the Dark", and "Open Country".

(Three of those books were written by other people.)

Me: When was the first postage stamp created?

Talkie: The first postage stamp was issued in 1840, and bore the effigy of the city of Berhn.

(Well, it got the year right.)

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SymbioteNov 2020

Standard Ebooks is on the front page at the moment, but unfortunately doesn't have these titles. Would you particularly recommend any of the five they do have:

- Poirot Investigates

- The Secret Adversary

- The Man in the Brown Suit

- The Murder on the Links

- The Mysterious Affair at Styles

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/agatha-christie

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philsnowNov 2020

oh very nice. My machine doesn't have a `tail -r`, but it has `tac`, which I guess does the same thing.

I tweaked your output to put author first, to make sorting work better:

    curl -s https://standardebooks.org/opds/all | awk '/<title>/ {split($0,a,">");split(a[2],b,"<")} /<name>/{split($0,c,">");split(c[2],d,"<");print d[1]" - "b[1]}' | sort

gives something like:

    A. A. Milne - The Red House Mystery
    A. Merritt - The Moon Pool
    Aesop - Fables
    Agatha Christie - Poirot Investigates
    Agatha Christie - The Man in the Brown Suit
    Agatha Christie - The Murder on the Links
    Agatha Christie - The Mysterious Affair at Styles
    Agatha Christie - The Secret Adversary
    Aldous Huxley - Antic Hay
    ...

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