Agatha Christie’s Complete Secret Notebooks. Агата Кристи

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.’ An Autobiography 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. In this ‘easy to write’ category she also included The Seven Dials Mystery, published four years later, which also features many of the same characters.

      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.

      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 these hints, 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. 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 twenty years later in The Body in the Library when Colonel Bantry shares this 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 one Christie plot, 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, both sharing 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. For many years 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, very early in her career, one of Christie’s first forays into 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.²¹

      And that was the last that was heard of Chimneys for over 70 years, until a copy of the manuscript appeared, equally mysteriously, on the desk of the Artistic Director of the Vertigo Theatre in Calgary, Canada. So, almost three-quarters of a century after its projected debut, the premiere of Chimneys took place on 11 October 2003. And in June 2006, UK audiences had the opportunity to see this ‘lost’ Agatha Christie play, when it was presented at the Pitlochry Theatre Festival.

      It is not known when exactly or, indeed, why Christie decided to adapt this novel for the stage, but it was probably done during late 1927/early 1928; a surviving typescript is dated July 1928. This would tally with the notes for the play, which are in the Notebook that has very brief, cryptic notes for some of the stories in The Thirteen Problems, the first of which appeared in December 1927. The Secret of Chimneys does not lend itself easily, or, it must be said, convincingly, to adaptation. If Christie decided in the late 1920s to dramatise one of her titles, one possible reason for choosing The Secret of Chimneys may have been her reluctance to put Poirot on the stage. She dropped him from four adaptations in later years: Murder on the Nile, Appointment with Death, The Hollow and Go Back for Murder (Five Little Pigs). The only play thus far to feature him was the original script, Black Coffee, staged the year before the proposed presentation of Chimneys. Yet, if she had wanted to adapt an earlier title, surely The Mysterious Affair at Styles or even The Murder on