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When she is suddenly orphaned, Anne Beddingfeld20 comes to London where she witnesses a suspicious death in a Tube station. A further death in the deserted Mill House convinces Anne to investigate and she boards a ship bound for South Africa, where she becomes involved in a breathless adventure.
Christie’s fourth novel drew extensively on her experiences with her first husband Archie when they both travelled the world in 1922. Although it starts in England, much of the novel is set on a ship travelling to South Africa and the climax of the novel takes place in Johannesburg. It is not a detective story but includes a whodunit element in tandem with murder, stolen jewels, a master criminal, mysterious messages and a shoot-out. It is an apprentice work before Christie found her true profession as a detective novelist and is hugely enjoyable, complete with a surprise solution which presages by two years her most stunning conjuring trick. And it also adopts the technique of using more than one narrator, a format that appears, in various guises, throughout her career in novels as diverse as The ABC Murders, Five Little Pigs and The Pale Horse.
The real-life Major Belcher, who employed Archie Christie as a business manager for the round-the-world trip, convinced Agatha Christie to include him as a character in her next novel. And he was not satisfied to be just any character; he wanted to be the murderer, whom he considered the most interesting character in any crime novel. He even suggested a title, Mystery at Mill House, the name of his own house. In An Autobiography Christie admits that although she did create a Sir Eustace Pedler, using some of Belcher’s characteristics, he was not actually the Major.
This unpublished photograph, from her 1922 world tour with Archie, shows Agatha Christie buying a wooden giraffe beside a train, exactly as her heroine, Anne, does in Chapter 23 of The Man in the Brown Suit.
She also relates in An Autobiography that when the serial rights of The Man in the Brown Suit were sold to the Evening News they changed the title to Anne the Adventuress. She thought this ‘as silly a title as I had ever heard’ – although the first page of Notebook 34 is headed ‘Adventurous Anne’.
The accuracy of the dozen pages in Notebook 34 suggests earlier, rougher notes, but as Christie wrote much of this book in South Africa it is understandable that they no longer exist.
Chapter I – Anne – her life with Papa – his friends … his death – A left penniless … interview with lawyer left with £95.
Chapter II – Accident in Tube – The Man in the Tube – Anne comes home.
Announcement in paper ‘Information Wanted’ solicitor from Scotland Yard – Inspector coming to interview Anne – her calmness – Brachycephalic – not a doctor. Suggest about being a detective – takes out piece of paper – smells mothballs – realises paper was taken from dead man 17 1 22
III – Visit to Editor (Lord Northcliffe) – takes influential card from hall – her reception – if she makes good. The order to view – Does she find something? Perhaps a roll of films?
[There is no IV in the notebook]
V – Walkendale Castle – her researches – The Arundel Castle – Anne makes her passage
VI – Major Sir Eustace Puffin [Pedler] – changing cabins – 13 – to – 17 – general fuss – Eustace, Anne and Dr Phillips and Pratt all laying claim to it
Or man rushes in to ask for aid – after stewardess has come she finds he is stabbed in the shoulder – Doctor enters ‘Allow me’ – She is suspicious of him – he smiles – in the end man is taken into doctor’s cabin and Ship’s doctor attends him
The reference to Lord Northcliffe, the famous newspaperman, suggests that Christie intended to base Lord Nasby, whom Anne visits in Chapter 5 to ask for a job, on him. And both the alternative scenarios involving the changing of cabins and the stabbed man featured in the novel.
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.’ An Autobiography makes only this fleeting reference to The Secret of Chimneys,
The Secret of Chimneys is not a formal detective story but a light-hearted thriller, a form to which she returned intermittently over the next quarter century. The Secret of Chimneys has all the ingredients, in generous profusion, 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 including 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, one of them of them a murderer.
But a major suspension of disbelief is called for when we are asked to believe that a young woman will pay a blackmailer £40 (roughly £1,500 today) for an indiscretion that she did not commit, just for the experience of being blackmailed (Chapter 6), and that two chapters later, when said 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.
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