After a few months at Scotswood, the Christies decided that they needed a house of their own, and they began to look at properties in the vicinity of Sunningdale. Their choice fell upon a large house with a pleasant garden, and, in 1925, after less than two years in their flat in the country, they moved into their own country house which, at Archie’s suggestion, they named Styles after the house in The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
Agatha’s literary agent, Edmund Cork, had been busy extricating his client from her involvement with The Bodley Head. Cork approached the firm of Collins, who had begun to add detective novels to their list, and offered them the first Agatha Christie title which did not have contractually to be offered to The Bodley Head. A three-book contract was signed with Collins as early as 27 January 1924, though there were at that time two volumes still to be published by The Bodley Head. The Secret of Chimneys was the last Agatha Christie novel to appear under The Bodley Head’s imprint. Collins became her English publishers for the rest of the author’s life.
The Secret of Chimneys is one of the best of Agatha Christie’s early thrillers. It is, in its way, as typical of its time, the twenties, as Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat or P. G. Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves, both of which were published several months before Chimneys. It also owes something to the Ruritanian world of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, for its plot is concerned with political events in the fictitious small Balkan state of Herzoslovakia, the character of whose people appears to be of an almost Montenegran fierceness. After a beginning in Bulawayo, however, the events of the novel take place not in the Balkans but in London or at Chimneys, one of the stately homes of England and the seat of the ninth Marquis of Caterham. Chimneys, we are told, is as much a national possession as a grand country house, and history has been made at its informed weekend parties. It was perhaps not unlike Cliveden.
Diplomatic intrigue involving the possible reinstatement of the Herzoslovakian royal family and international crime concerning the attempts of a jewel thief known throughout Europe as ‘King Victor’ are ingeniously combined in The Secret of Chimneys, and at the end two characters are unmasked and revealed in their true colours, though only one of them is criminal.
It is when she is freed of some of the restrictions of the domestic murder mystery, as in this type of novel, that Mrs Christie seems able to relax into more leisurely, and, therefore, more detailed and believable characterization. Believable, that is, in the context of your willingly suspended disbelief; for, although the reader greatly enjoys making the acquaintance of, for instance, Baron Lolopretjzyl who represents in London the Loyalist Party of Herzoslovakia, it has to be admitted that the Baron’s construction of English sentences is a trifle more exotic than it need be. ‘Of many secrets he the knowledge had. Should he reveal but the quarter of them, Europe into war plunged may be,’ he says of a fellow countryman.
The Baron resides in a suite at Harridge’s Hotel. Mrs Christie’s London hotels are only lightly disguised. Mr Anthony Cade, who may or may not be the hero of the story, stays at the Blitz, which seems an inappropriate, indeed irreverent, name for an hotel clearly based on the Ritz. The Blitz, however, is oddly situated. Although, at one point, it appears to be where it ought to be, in Piccadilly, when Anthony Cade first arrives he strolls outside for a brief walk on the Embankment, for all the world as though he were staying at the Savoy.
Though it is not he but one of the upperclass amateurs who solves the secret of Chimneys, Superintendent Battle who is in charge of the case is no plodding and unimaginative policeman inserted into the plot to be the butt of the amateur genius’s humour. Battle is not at all like Inspector Japp (who is mentally continually trailing along some steps behind Hercule Poirot’s thought processes): he is an intelligent and successful officer whose speciality appears to be crimes in which politics or international diplomacy are involved. Outwardly a stolid and impassive figure, Battle reaches his conclusions by a dogged application of common sense. After The Secret of Chimneys, he was to appear in four more Christie novels in some of which he would deal with purely domestic crimes.
Occasionally, Agatha Christie carried over from one book to another characters other than her detectives and policemen. Not only Superintendent Battle but also four other characters from The Secret of Chimneys appear again four years later in The Seven Dials Mystery, as does the house, Chimneys. The house itself, and the kind of life lived in it, play a lively part in both novels. Chroniclers of a fast disappearing scene will be interested to note that the lavish English breakfast was still very much in evidence in the twenties. On the sideboard in the dining-room were half a score of heavy silver dishes, ‘ingeniously kept hot by patent arrangements’. Lord Caterham lifts each lid in turn. ‘Omelette,’ he mutters, ‘eggs and bacon, kidneys, devilled bird, haddock, cold ham, cold pheasant.’ Deciding he cares for none of these things, he tells his butler to ‘ask the cook to poach me an egg.’
The mandatory racial slurs occur in The Secret of Chimneys, though apparently they have been edited out of more recent American editions. ‘Dagos will be dagos’, ‘Like all dagos, he couldn’t swim’, and other remarks are cheerfully exchanged, and of course all references to Jews are uncomplimentary. People are beginning to be interested in Herzoslovakia, Anthony Cade tells his friend Jimmy, and, when asked what kind of people, he replies, ‘Hebraic people. Yellow-faced financiers in city offices.’ When we meet one of these financiers, Herman Isaacstein, we are invited to smile at Lord Caterham’s references to him as ‘Mr Ikey Isaacstein’, ‘Noseystein’, and ‘Fat Ikey’. But the true-blue British unemployed are treated with equal contempt. When Anthony Cade disguises himself as an out-of-work ex-serviceman, the upperclass Virginia Revel takes one look at him and decides that he is ‘a more pleasing specimen than usual of London’s unemployed’.
Her attitude to democracy is so unsympathetic, at least as expressed by a character of whom Mrs Christie evidently approves, that it reveals an unexpectedly authoritarian aspect of the author’s nature:
Mind you, I still believe in democracy. But you’ve got to force it on people with a strong hand – ram it down their throats. Men don’t want to be brothers – they may some day, but they don’t now. My belief in the brotherhood of man died the day I arrived in London last week, when I observed the people standing in a Tube train resolutely refuse to move up and make room for those who entered. You won’t turn people into angels by appealing to their better natures yet awhile – but by judicious force you can coerce them into behaving more or less decently to one another to go on with.
It is true that people on the Moscow underground are less surly in their behaviour than those in London and New York, but you would hesitate to use the citizenry of Moscow as a kind of democratic barometer. Even Agatha Christie, one imagines, if she had been offered the choice would have preferred to be bad-tempered in a democracy than polite in a police state.
The danger of pontificating solemnly on the subject of Agatha Christie’s politics must, however, be guarded against. The author tells us in The Secret of Chimneys that there was nothing that bored Lord Caterham more than politics, unless it was politicians, and one suspects that she shared his Lordship’s feelings. No one need be deterred from enjoying The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie’s politics, nor even by occasional infelicities in her prose style, though prose is more serious a matter than politics. Is there not something endearing about an author who can write the phrase, ‘eyeing a taxi that was crawling past with longing eyes’?
In general, Mrs Christie’s grasp of style is firm: The Secret of Chimneys is enjoyable because its style is light and humorous. It is not, like Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, an adventure-romance, but a comedy-adventure,