In common with many crime stories of the period there are two floor-plans and no less than three reproductions of handwriting. Each has a part to play in the eventual solution. And here also we see for the first time Poirot’s remedy for steadying his nerves and encouraging precision in thought: the building of card-houses. At crucial points in both Lord Edgware Dies and Three Act Tragedy he adopts a similar strategy, each time with equally triumphant results. The important argument overheard by Mary Cavendish through an open window in Chapter 6 foreshadows a similar and equally important case of eavesdropping in Five Little Pigs.
In his 1953 survey of detective fiction, Blood in their Ink, Sutherland Scott describes The Mysterious Affair at Styles as ‘one of the finest “firsts” ever written’. Countless Christie readers over almost a century would enthusiastically agree.
The Secret of Chimneys
12 June 1925
A shooting party weekend at the country house Chimneys conceals the presence of international diplomats negotiating lucrative oil concessions with the kingdom of Herzoslovakia. When a dead body is found, Superintendent Battle’s subsequent investigation uncovers international jewel thieves, impersonation and kidnapping as well as murder.
‘These were easy to write, not requiring too much plotting or planning.’ In her Autobiography, Agatha Christie makes only this fleeting reference to The Secret of Chimneys, first published in the summer of 1925 as the last of the six books she had contracted to produce for John Lane when they accepted The Mysterious Affair at Styles. In this ‘easy to write’ category she also included The Seven Dials Mystery, published in 1929, and, indeed, the later title features many of the same characters as the earlier.
The Secret of Chimneys is not a formal detective story but a light-hearted thriller, a form to which she returned throughout her writing career with The Man in the Brown Suit, The Seven Dials Mystery, Why Didn’t they ask Evans? and They Came to Baghdad. The Secret of Chimneys has all the ingredients of a good thriller of the period – missing jewels, a mysterious manuscript, compromising letters, oil concessions, a foreign throne, villains, heroes, and mysterious and beautiful women. It has distinct echoes of The Prisoner of Zenda, Anthony Hope’s immortal swashbuckling novel that Tuppence recalls with affection in Chapter 2 of Postern of Fate – ‘one’s first introduction, really, to the romantic novel. The romance of Prince Flavia. The King of Ruritania, Rudolph Rassendyll …’ Christie organised these classic elements into a labyrinthine plot and also managed to incorporate a whodunit element.
The story begins in Africa, a country Christie had recently visited on her world tour in the company of her husband Archie. The protagonist, the somewhat mysterious Anthony Cade, undertakes to deliver a package to an address in London. This seemingly straightforward mission proves difficult and dangerous and before he can complete it he meets the beautiful Virginia Revel, who also has a commission for him – to dispose of the inconveniently dead body of her blackmailer. This achieved, they meet again at Chimneys, the country estate of Lord Caterham and his daughter Lady Eileen ‘Bundle’ Brent. From this point on, we are in more ‘normal’ Christie territory, the country house with a group of temporarily isolated characters – and one of them a murderer.
That said, it must be admitted that a hefty suspension of disbelief is called for if some aspects of the plot are to be accepted. We are asked to believe that a young woman will pay a blackmailer a large sum of money (£40 in 1930 has the purchasing power today of roughly £1,500) for an indiscretion that she did not commit, just for the experience of being blackmailed (Chapter 7), and that two chapters later when the blackmailer is found inconveniently, and unconvincingly, dead in her sitting room, she asks the first person who turns up on her doorstep (literally) to dispose of the body, while she blithely goes away for the weekend. By its nature this type of thriller is light-hearted, but The Secret of Chimneys demands much indulgence on the part of the reader.
The hand of Christie the detective novelist is evident in elements of the narration. Throughout the book the reliability of Anthony Cade is constantly in doubt and as early as Chapter 1 he jokes with his tourist group (and, by extension, the reader) about his real name. This is taken as part of his general banter but, as events unfold, he is revealed to be speaking nothing less than the truth. For the rest of the book Christie makes vague statements about Cade and when we are given his thoughts they are, in retrospect, ambiguous.
Anthony looked up sharply.
‘Herzoslovakia?’ he said with a curious ring in his voice. [Chapter 1]
‘… was it likely that any of them would recognise him now if they were to meet him face to face?’ [Chapter 5]
‘No connexion with Prince Michael’s death, is there?’
His hand was quite steady. So were his eyes. [Chapter 18]
‘The part of Prince Nicholas of Herzoslovakia.’
The matchbox fell from Anthony’s hand, but his amazement was fully equalled by that of Battle. [Chapter 19]
‘I’m really a king in disguise, you know’ [Chapter 23]
And how many readers will wonder about the curious scene at the end of Chapter 16 when Anchoukoff, the manservant, tells him he ‘will serve him to the death’ and Anthony ponders on ‘the instincts these fellows have’? Anthony’s motives remain unclear until the final chapter, and the reader, despite the hints contained in the above quotations, is unlikely to divine his true identity and purpose.
There are references, unconscious or otherwise, to other Christie titles. The rueful comments in Chapter 5 when Anthony remarks, ‘I know all about publishers – they sit on manuscripts and hatch ’em like eggs. It will be at least a year before the thing is published,’ echo Christie’s own experiences with John Lane and the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles five years earlier. The ploy of leaving a dead body in a railway left-luggage office, adopted by Cade in Chapter 9, was used in the 1923 Poirot short story ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’. Lord Caterham’s description of the finding of the body in Chapter 10 distinctly foreshadows a similar scene almost 20 years later in The Body in the Library when Colonel Bantry shares his unwelcome experience. And Virginia Revel’s throwaway comments about governesses and companions in Chapter 22 – ‘It’s awful but I never really look at them properly. Do you?’ – would become the basis of more than a few future Christie plots, among them Death in the Clouds, After the Funeral and Appointment with Death. The same chapter is called ‘The Red Signal’, also the title of a short story from The Hound of Death (see Chapter 3). Both this chapter and the short story share a common theme.
There are a dozen pages of notes in Notebook 65 for the novel, consisting mainly of a list of chapters and their possible content with no surprises or plot variations. But the other incarnation of The Secret of Chimneys makes for more interesting reading. Until recently this title was one of the few Christies not adapted for stage, screen or radio. Or so it was thought, until it emerged that the novel was actually, very early in her career, Christie’s first stage adaptation. The history of the play is, appropriately, mysterious. It was scheduled to appear at the Embassy Theatre in London in December 1931 but was replaced at the last moment by a play called Mary Broome, a twenty-year-old comedy by one Allan Monkhouse. The Embassy Theatre no longer exists and research has failed to discover a definitive reason for the last-minute cancellation and substitution. Almost a year before the proposed staging of Chimneys, Christie was writing from Ashfield in Torquay to her new husband, Max Mallowan, who was on an archaeological dig. Rather than clarifying