Berlin believed Enigma was unbreakable, making it all the more essential to ensure that only a very small circle of people knew what the codebreakers at Bletchley were up to. The codebreakers at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire had broken German Enigma machine cyphers, enabling Churchill and his military commanders to know what the enemy was planning. Had Christie mischievously named the character Bletchley because Knox told her what was going on there? MI5 was concerned that the major's inside knowledge of the progress of the war was based on what the codebreakers knew about Hitler's plans. Major Bletchley comes across as a tedious former Indian army officer who claims to know the secrets of Britain's wartime efforts.Ĭhristie happened to be a close friend of Dilly Knox, one of the leading codebreakers at Bletchley Park. In the book, published in 1941, N and M are the initials given to two of Hitler's agents as Tommy and Tuppence hunt for the enemy within. He appears in the book as a friend of Christie's pair of detectives, Tommy and Tuppence. What made MI5 suspect one of Britain's famous crime writers? The answer, it can now be revealed, lay in the name of a character in her wartime novel N or M, whom she called Major Bletchley.
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