‘The Secret Of Chimneys’, published In 1925, was Agatha Christie’s fifth novel. Like ‘The Secret Adversary’ (1922) and ‘The Man In The Brown Suit’ (1924), it is an early example of a thriller, rather than a detective story. It is also the first of her five Superintendent Battle books.
Sadly, it has neither the freshness and vigour of the earlier thrillers. They had main characters I could root for. ‘The Secret Of Chimneys’ is filled with people I’d prefer not to spend time with. Superintendent Battle is the best thing in the book and he isn’t given much to do except demonstrate that, even though he’s a policeman and is not a gentleman, he’s still astute and intelligent. How remarkable is that?
It was a book I was glad to be done with. The plot manages to be silly without being amusing. I felt as if I’d just stepped out of a period adaptation of Scooby Doo with added doses of patriarchy, xenophobia, and aristocratic exceptionalism thrown in for authenticity.
I detested the hero, Anthony Cade, on sight and further acquaintance only confirmed my poor opinion of him as a chancer, all confidence and cunning wrapped up in charm. The aristocrats in the book respond to him as ‘one of us’ not despite his behaviour but because that behaviour demonstrates his unassailable sense of entitlement.
The foreigners presented in the book have all the authenticity of a Tintin cartoon. Christie demonstrates her dislike of Italians, her disdain for Slavs, her sense that a British financier with the surname Isaacstein is almost a foreigner and her belief that even foreign aristocrats negotiating internal contracts can’t master the basics of English syntax.
The denouement is so ludicrous it’s almost a pastiche of itself. After the big reveal, Christie makes us trudge through two more chapters, one to help anyone who hasn’t understood the plot to have it explained to them one more time and a final one for readers who need this rather dull cake to be iced over with an attempt at romance. Even the romance fails, degrading into a successful negotiation between two people who know themselves too well to have any truck with romance.
If this had been my first Christie, it would have been my last.
Mike Finn's Fiction 
There is a TV adaptation of this one but for some strange reason Miss Marple (Julia McKenzie) is there to solve the mystery.
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How bizarre. This was written seven years before Christie wrote her first Miss Marple novel. Still, they can’t have made the story any worse.
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It isn’t bizarre at all. Some of Christie’s published Marple books eg The Moving Finger include Marple, whose presence is almost completely unnecessary, only presumably so the could be advertised as another Marple book. The TV producers just took this a stage further. It is easier to promote and sell series with recurring characters. The Marple TVseries has made to realise I actually quite enjoy a lot of the non-Marple non-Poirot stories more than I expected.
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The Marple TV series shoe-horned Marple into c. 35 stories that were written without Marple. The series is also free with changing plots etc. However, you’re watching a TV series which may bring Christie to a wider audience and the series has a lot of entertaining episodes despote (or because of) changes from the original book.
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It sounds ghastly.
Ona related note, I made the mistake of starting to read The Professor by Charlotte Brontë, which is incredibly racist … about the Belgians.
In retrospect, Jane Eyre is also racist but when I was a child, I had no idea that Creole meant “mixed-race” so I assumed that Mr Rochester’s first wife was like that because she came from a plantation-owning family.
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Most detective fiction in English up to the 90s is racist, or anti-semitic and often class-superior, too. Sayers, and Christie are particularly noticeable in this respect. Marlowe’s LA of the 40s and 50s is racist and Marlowe, who isn’t, doesn’t call this out. Sadly and surprisingly, there is an anti-semitic description in a Colin Dexter Morse story published in the 80s. It is not a surprise that fiction and writers echo and represent their times.
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Wow Mike you really didn’t like this one. I’ll have to see if I can get time to fit it in for the group read.
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It’s one that opinion seems to be divided on. Some of the folks in the group read have had fun with it. I’d be interested to know what you think of it if you get time to read it.
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One of my all-time favorites. I love Virginia Revel and Bundle. I like that Superintendent Battle is portrayed as knowing more than the others. Anthony Cade is a good Ruritarian hero.
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