‘Oh, damn!’ cried Virginia, jamming down the receiver. It was horrible to be shut up with a dead body and to have no one to speak to.
(Virginia Revel, chapter 8)

‘I’m sorry it were a foreigner,’ said Johnson, with some regret. It made the murder seem less real. Foreigners, Johnson felt, were liable to be shot.
(Constable Johnson, chapter 10)

‘The whole thing’s horribly mysterious.’
(Virginia Revel, chapter 15)

‘I should like to tell you the story of my life,’ he remarked, ‘but it’s going to be rather a busy evening.’
(Anthony, chapter 9)

‘Do you talk?’ asked Bundle. ‘Or are you just strong and silent?’
(Bundle to Anthony, chapter 15)

‘We’ve never had a murder in the house before. Exciting, isn’t it? I’m sorry your character was so completely cleared this morning. I’ve always wanted to meet a murderer and see for myself if they’re as genial and charming as the Sunday papers always say they are.’
(Bundle to Anthony, chapter 15)

‘I find talking to foreigners particularly fatiguing. I think it’s because they’re so polite.’
(Lord Caterham, chapter 16)

Bundle looked at him with lifted eyebrows. ‘Crook stuff?’ she inquired.
(Chapter 22)

‘I never deny anything that amuses me.’
(Anthony, chapter 27)

‘Oh, Anthony,’ cried Virginia. ‘How perfectly screaming!’
(Chapter 30)

International conspiracies

I thought the ridiculous novel ‘The Big Four’ with its plot about a fiendish international crime organisation must be an aberration in Christie’s oeuvre, which I had been led to believe was all about country house murder mysteries but not a bit of it – ‘The Secret of Chimneys’ is also about international intrigue and secret organisations, centres on political events on the other side of Europe and an international criminal master of disguise, not to mention gold hunting in Africa and American undercover detectives, all leading up to an outrageous series of revelations and reversals. And it was followed by a sequel (‘The Seven Dials Mystery’) which is even more preposterous. So half her output in the 1920s has more in common with espionage fiction than sedate murder mysteries.

Synopsis

Anthony Cade’s two tasks

The story starts in faraway Rhodesia. Here a jolly good chap named Anthony Cade is making money as a tour guide for pasty Brits. He bumps into an old pal, James McGrath, who gives him two rather bizarre tasks which both require a bit of backstory.

Count Stylptitch Some time earlier, in Paris, he’d seen a man be set upon by a group of thugs and had gone to his rescue. the man turned out to be Count Stylptitch, a courtier in the court of King Nicholas IV of the fictional country of Herzoslovakia. This country is notorious for its assassinations, and seven years earlier King Nicholas had been assassinated and the country became a republic. Count Stylptitch went into exile in Paris where McGrath happened to save him from a beating.

McGrath forgot about it until a few weeks ago when he received a parcel. It contained the memoirs of this Count Stylptitch and a note to the effect that if he delivered the manuscript to a certain firm of publishers (Messrs. Balderson and Hodgkins) in London on or before October 13, he would receive £1,000. Now McGrath is just about to go on an expedition into the interior of Africa in search of fabled gold mines, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so he asks Anthony a favour. Can he travel back to London, under the name James McGrath, hand over the manuscript to the publishers, and receive the £1,000. How about if he gives him 25%, £250. Anthony is sick of being a tour guide and so says yes.

Dutch Pedro But as if that wasn’t contorted and implausible enough, McGrath gives Anthony a second task. This is also related to a Good Samaritan intervention, for some time earlier, in Uganda, McGrath saw a man drowning in a river, dived in and saved him. Once rescued, this man (derogatorily referred to throughout simply as a ‘Dago’ [‘an insulting and contemptuous term for a person of Italian or Spanish birth or descent’]), although going under the name of Dutch Pedro, gives McGrath the most valuable thing he owns which turns out to be a bundle of love letters written by a married Englishwoman to someone not her husband. The D*** had been blackmailing her and now handed over the letters to McGrath so that he could blackmail her in his turn. The letters don’t contain an address but two clues: at one point they mention a place, a country house called Chimneys.

‘Chimneys?’ [Anthony] said. ‘That’s rather extraordinary.’
‘Why, do you know it?’
‘It’s one of the stately homes of England, my dear James. A place where Kings and Queens go for weekends, and diplomatists forgather and diplome.’

And one of the letters is signed with a name, Virginia Revel.

Right. So McGrath is tasking Anthony with taking both the memoirs and the letters back to England, handing over the memoirs to the nominated publisher, and tracking down and handing the letters back to this lady, Virginia Revel. Right. OK.

International intrigue

The second element in the setup and the reason all the action converges on this country house, Chimneys, is as follows. Oil has recently (and implausibly) been discovered in Herzoslovakia. At the same time the people have become disillusioned with their republican government and many hanker for a return of the monarchy. The British government is prepared to back the return of the nearest relative to the assassinated Nicholas IV to the throne, Prince Michael, in exchange for the new king and his government signing favourable oil concessions to a syndicate of British oil companies. These are represented by a Jewish businessman, Mr Herman Isaacstein (who is described with a wealth of antisemitic tropes and stereotypes).

The current Secretary of State, the permanently anxious and stressed George Lomax, who lives at a country pile named Wyvern Abbey, persuades his friend, the easy-going Lord Caterham, to host an informal meeting of all the people involved in this international plan, at his country house, Chimneys (seven miles from Wyvern). Here’s the tone of humorous Lord Caterham and his daughter:

‘Who wants to be a peer nowadays?’
‘Nobody,’ said Bundle. ‘They’d much rather keep a prosperous public house.’

They want to conceal the meeting’s true nature from a curious world (and the press) and so George asks Lord Caterham to invite other, ‘neutral’ guests to make it look like a genuine country house party. As George explains:

GEORGE: ‘One slip over this Herzoslovakian business and we’re done. It is most important that the Oil concessions should be granted to a British company. You must see that?’
LORD CATERHAM: ‘Of course, of course.’
GEORGE: ‘Prince Michael Obolovitch arrives the end of the week, and the whole thing can be carried through at Chimneys under the guise of a shooting party.’

So all converging on this lovely stately home are:

• Lord Caterham – owner of Chimneys and reluctant host
• Lady Eileen ‘Bundle’ Brent – eldest daughter of Lord Caterham
• The Honourable George Lomax – Foreign Office
• Bill Eversleigh – Lomax’s secretary
• Herman Isaacstein – financier of the British oil syndicate
• Prince Michael Obolovitch of Herzoslovakia –
• Captain Andrassy – his equerry
• Hiram P. Fish – collector of first editions, invited to the house party by Lord Caterham
• Virginia Revel – cousin of George Lomax, daughter of a peer, society beauty and young widow of…
• Timothy Revel, former British envoy to Herzoslovakia i.e. is familiar with the country and its politics
• Tredwell – the grey-haired old butler

More about Chimneys:

Clement Edward Alistair Brent, ninth Marquis of Caterham, was a small gentleman, shabbily dressed, and entirely unlike the popular conception of a Marquis. He had faded blue eyes, a thin melancholy nose, and a vague but courteous manner. At one time Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, he had always bulked largely in the counsels of the Empire, and his country seat, Chimneys, was famous for its hospitality. Ably seconded by his wife, a daughter of the Duke of Perth, history had been made and unmade at informal week-end parties at Chimneys, and there was hardly anyone of note in England—or indeed in Europe—who had not, at one time or another, stayed there.

In London

But before we get to Chimneys, there are some important and ‘exciting’ scenes in London, some to do with Count Stylptitch’s memoirs, some to do with the blackmail letters of Virginia Revel.

The memoirs The thing about the Count’s memoirs is they may contain compromising information or stories about the assassinated king and his court which will wreck the Royalists’ plan of getting back into power. So on his first day back in London, Anthony he is approached by two different Herzoslovakian men who both try to acquire the manuscript. The first is a Count who supports the Royalist faction and offers to outbid the publisher in order to suppress any embarrassing information it might contain. Cade politely but firmly refuses. The second is a member of a revolutionary group, the Comrades of the Red Hand (‘They’re very fond of executing traitors. It has a picturesque element which seems to appeal to them’), who demands that Anthony hand it over at gunpoint. But Anthony is not only frightfully posh (Eton and Oxford) but because of his time in Africa, is lean, fit and can handle himself. So he disarms the man and sends him away.

The publisher McGrath mentioned phones Cade the next day, telling him that a) the situation has become very dangerous, with people contacting them and threatening them against publishing it and b) promising to send their employee, Mr Holmes, to pick up the memoir, which he duly does, takes delivery of the manuscript and hands over a cheque for £1,000. So Anthony thinks he has concluded one of his two tasks successfully.

So he carries out the next stage in his plan, which is to ditch the alias of James McGrath which he has used up to this point in order to get the £1,000 from the publishers. So he checks out of the posh Blitz Hotel where’s he’s been staying (and with that ‘James’ McGrath’ disappears from public records) and gets a taxi to a much cheaper hotel where he checks in under his own name, Anthony Cade.

However, just before he left the Blitz, he received a message brought by a messenger boy. This was written by George Lomax, who says he has only just learned of McGrath’s arrival in Britain with the fateful memoirs, and was begging James McGrath not to hand them over to the publishers until he (McGrath) comes to see him (Lomax) at a country house party being held this weekend at Chimneys.

Well, thinks Anthony laconically, it’s too late to prevent the handing over of the memoirs, and he is no longer ‘James McGrath’, but all this fuss about Chimneys doesn’t half tempt him to travel down to the place and gatecrash this weekend party.

The letters As to the blackmail letters, to go back a bit, the night before he checked out of the Blitz, Anthony awakens to discover one of the hotel waiters he recognises, Giuseppe, has broken into his room and is rummaging through his luggage. They have a fight, which is long enough for Anthony to see his face and hear his Italian accent, but the waiter breaks away and escapes and Anthony then discovers he has taken the packet of letters with him. Anthony suspects the man had been hired by one of the Herzoslovakian factions and took the letters by mistake, imagining a bunch of documents tied up in a bundle must be the famous memoirs.

So on one level this is a tale of two manuscripts, which get mixed up.

Virginia Revel

During these exciting two days Anthony had been trying to track down the ‘Virginia Revel’ mentioned in the letters. He had discovered from the telephone directory that there were six Virginia Revels in the London area and had begun the process of visiting them to identify the correct one.

Now we cut to the experiences of the Virginia Revel who the story is going to increasingly feature. But the important thing to bear in mind is that she is not the Virginia Revel of the letters. She never wrote the letters, she’s got nothing to do with them. She is the wrong Virginia Revel.

But the Italian waiter who stole the bundle from Anthony’s hotel room, having realised their blackmail potential, makes the same mistake as everyone else and approaches her, the wrong Virginia Revel, with a sample letter. He turns up at Virginia’s home and, unaware that she did not write the letters and that her husband is dead, he attempts to blackmail her.

Now here’s the thing about this book, its characters, plot and tone: Virginia immediately realises that she is not the Virginia Revel who wrote the letters but she decides to humour the blackmailer and pretend that she is! Why? For the lolz. For the gagz. To see what it feels like to be blackmailed.

Exactly like Anthony Cade, this Virginia Revel is so confident of her place in English society and the English class system (cousin of George Lomax, daughter of a peer, society beauty and widow of an ambassador) that she treats everything that happens in her life with droll, upper-class confidence, as endless sources of potential amusement. Later, it is said of her that:

Her position was so assured and unassailable that anyone for whom she vouched was accepted as a matter of course. (Chapter 13)

To use the modern phrase, both Virginia and Anthony positively reek of upper class privilege, and it is their cheerful, indomitable, ironic handling of all the aspects of a traditional murder mystery (international intrigue, disguises, dead bodies) which make the book such fun to read.

So on this frivolous impulse Virginia plays the part of a blackmail victim, hands over the petty cash she has in the house and promises to pay him more tomorrow at 6 o’clock. But when she arrives home the next day, after playing tennis (one of the new 1920s sporting fads, along with golf – see The Murder on the Links) she finds this same blackmailer shot dead in her house.

Virginia has a maid, Élise, who she tells to go out on a chore while she ponders what to do next, just as who turns up on her doorstep? The tall confident hero of the book, Anthony Wade. At this point he hasn’t revealed his name and is posing as a member of the unemployed because he’s still sussing out whether Virginia is the Virginia. But she pulls him inside and says she’s got a job for him. Immediately they hit it off with a shared sense of upper class savoir faire and a certain amount of physical attraction, too.

‘This isn’t regular work you’re offering me, I hope?’
A smile hovered for a moment on her lips.
‘It’s very irregular.’
‘Good,’ said the young man in a tone of satisfaction.
(Chapter 8)

Virginia tells him about the body which they both treat with upper-class confidence.

‘There’s a dead man in the next room,’ said Virginia. ‘He’s been murdered, and I don’t know what to do about it.’
She blurted out the words as simply as a child might have done. The young man went up enormously in her estimation by the way he accepted her statement. He might have been used to hearing a similar announcement made every day of his life.
‘Excellent,’ he said, with a trace of enthusiasm. ‘I’ve always wanted to do a bit of amateur detective work.’
(Chapter 8)

When he inspects the corpse, Anthony realises it’s the same waiter who broke into his room at the Blitz and stole the letters. He promises to get rid of the corpse. After all, he’s never disposed of a dead body before and is quite thrilled at the idea, just as Virginia had never been blackmailed before and was up for the lolz.

‘I’ve always wanted to see if I couldn’t conceal a crime with the necessary cunning, but have had a squeamish objection to shedding blood.’
(Chapter 9)

And:

Virginia: ‘It’s really dreadful of me saddling a perfect stranger with a dead body like this.’
‘I like it,’ returned Anthony nonchalantly. ‘If one of my friends, Jimmy McGrath, were here, he’d tell you that anything of this kind suits me down to the ground.’
(Chapter 9)

So Anthony puts the body into one of Virginia’s trunk, then there’s a lot of fol-de-rol about her taking it to a train station and leaving it in left luggage, Anthony collecting it, putting it in his car and driving out of London. Way out in the sticks he dumps the body along a stretch of empty road (on ‘the long stretch of road mid-way between Hounslow and Staines’, not so quiet and unfrequented now!).

Oh yes, there’s an aspect of the murder which puzzled our two posh amateur sleuths which is that the gun which shot the blackmailer was left by his body. Why? And a bigger question: the little gun was engraved with the name of ‘Virginia’!! Had she seen it before? No, she insists. Then what? Why? And of course the bigger question, Who shot him in the first place, and why?

Something else I haven’t mentioned yet, which is that when Virginia first got home from tennis, she discovered that all her servants including the devoted butler, all except Élise the maid, had gone down to Datchet (a small town outside Windsor). What? Turns out she owns a little country place there and from time to time asks her servants to go there and prepare it for her. But not today. Someone else sent the household a telegram to be out, someone who knows all about her household arrangements and habits. But who? And why?

And I also haven’t had space to explain yet, but all this happens on the very afternoon of the day she’s due to go down to Chimneys, for what she thinks, at this stage, will be a jolly country house party. Now when Anthony read the blackmail letters back in Africa, one of the few clues in them was mention of this same country house, Chimneys. And when Anthony rifled through the dead man’s pockets, in the lining of his coat he found a scrap of paper with a fragment of text on it, reading ‘Chimneys 11.45 Thursday.’

The letters mention Chimneys. This scrap of paper mentions Chimneys. Virginia has been invited to Chimneys. So as the pair confer they become increasingly certain that something is going to happen at this place, Chimneys, and during this supposed country house party. But what?

So after disposing of the corpse, as described, Anthony gets back in his ‘battered second-hand Morris Cowley’ and drives north till he comes to the wall surrounding the Chimneys estate. A wall isn’t going to stop out hero, so he climbs over it, walks across the wet grounds, and is just approaching the house itself when he hears a short ring out!

Oh no! Is he too late? Has someone been murdered? Who? And Why? Is Virginia safe? Will Anthony find himself suspected of the murder?

I’ve summarised about the first third of the story. At this point I think that, in the spirit of the thing, I’ll stop my summary. If you want to enjoy the further complications, red herrings and improbable explanations which Christie cooks up in profusion, the entire novel is freely available to read online. Clue:

‘How frightfully exciting,’ commented Bundle. ‘You don’t usually get a murder and a burglary crowded into one week-end.’

The only thing I will say is that, when there is trouble at Chimneys on the fateful weekend (as the reader, by now, strongly expects there will be) it triggers the introduction of the bluff, imperturbable Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard:

… a squarely built middle-aged man with a face so singularly devoid of expression as to be quite remarkable.
(Chapter 11)

who was to go on and become a recurring character in Christie’s work, appearing in a further four novels. Everyone realises how canny he is in his quiet unassuming way:

But at that moment, the moment when Battle apparently admitted Anthony’s complete absence of complicity in the crime, Anthony felt more than ever the need of being upon his guard. Superintendent Battle was a very astute officer. It would not do to make any slip with Superintendent Battle about.
(Chapter 12)

Antisemitism

I’ve noticed the presence of antisemitic animus on a number of authors of this period, including Saki, D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. In this novel the antisemitic tropes gather around the figure of the Jewish financier, Mr Herman Isaacstein.

There was one other person in the room, a big man sitting in a chair by the fireplace. He was dressed in very correct English shooting clothes which nevertheless sat strangely upon him. He had a fat yellow face, and black eyes, as impenetrable as those of a cobra. There was a generous curve to the big nose and power in the square lines of the vast jaw.

Earlier Lord Caterham, otherwise a genial old cove, refers to Isaacstein as ‘Mr Ikey Hermanstein’ and then as ‘Nosystein’ (with reference to his big hooked pantomime Jew’s nose) and later to ‘Fat Iky’.

The cobra simile stated in the passage above is repeated later:

His [Isaacstein’s] black eyes were bent upon the detective. More than ever, he reminded Battle of a hooded cobra.

Later:

VIRGINIA: ‘Isaacstein looks foreign enough, Heaven knows.’

The lazy antisemitic tropes surrounding him are unpleasant.

Black

If we’re pointing out slurs, there’s a race-related moment right at the novel’s conclusion when, for a moment, his friends panic that Anthony might have married a black woman!

The Baron retreated a step or two. Dismay overspread his countenance. ‘Something wrong I knew there would be,’ he boomed. ‘Merciful God in Heaven! He has married a black woman in Africa!’
‘Come, come, it’s not so bad as all that,’ said Anthony, laughing. ‘She’s white enough—white all through, bless her.’

The more you reflect on this little exchange, the worse it becomes.

Balkans business

To a very large extent the text is made up of clichés, I think Christie’s claim to novelty at the time must surely have been not so much the subject matter or behaviour of the characters so much as the extraordinary complexity of the twists and turns of the narrative, the laying of countless false clues, and then the dazzling revelations at the end which come as a complete surprise (as they do in this novel).

History of Ruritania

The fictional country of Ruritania is first mentioned in The Prisoner of Zenda. According to the Wikipedia article ‘Nowadays, the term connotes a quaint minor European country’ associated with kings and princes with preposterous names, colourful costumes, in a state of permanent political unrest. The same idea – of the Balkans as the home of a particular type of comic political intrigue – is found all over early 20th century fiction, in various Sherlock Holmes stories, Arnold Bennett’s preposterous comedy thriller the Grand Hotel Babylon, in John Buchan thrillers, through to Tintin whose 1938 adventure ‘King Ottokar’s Sceptre’ is set in the fictional Balkan (i.e. Ruritanian) country of Syldavia, complete with fragile kings and plotting courtiers etc etc.

My point is that The Secret of Chimneys can be added to the list of fictions which use the clichés and tropes of the embattled royal family of a fictional Balkan state to manufacture a popular thriller narrative.

Christie’s bookishness

Not literary references, the opposite: I’m referring to her compulsive need to have the narrator or characters make regular comparisons to the clichés and stereotypes of the cheap thrillers and thousands of other detective novels which clearly infested the world, even by the early 1920s.

About the same height as Mr. Cade, but thickset and not nearly so good-looking. The sort of man one read about in books, who probably kept a saloon.
(Narrator)

‘As they say in books. Guile, George, lots of guile.’
(Virginia)

‘First a blackmailer, and then George in diplomatic difficulties. Will he tell all to the beautiful woman who asks for his confidence so pathetically? No, he will reveal nothing until the last chapter.’
(Virginia)

‘Good heavens!’ cried Virginia. ‘Is this Sherlock Holmes?’
‘No,’ said Anthony regretfully. ‘I’m afraid it’s just plain or garden cheating.’

‘And whatever you may imagine from reading detective stories, doctors aren’t such magicians that they can tell you exactly how many hours a man has been dead.’
(Anthony)

‘I take it that you didn’t meet the murdered man?’
‘No. To put it like a book, he “retired to his own apartments immediately on arrival.”‘
(Anthony and Virginia)

‘Why did you seem so surprised when I mentioned the name of Jimmy McGrath to you yesterday at Pont Street? Had you heard it before?’
‘I had, Sherlock Holmes.’
(Anthony and Virginia, chapter 15)

‘I suspected the French governess, Battle. A: Upon the grounds of her being the most unlikely person, according to the canons of the best fiction…
(Anthony, chapter 18)

‘Do you really think this Arsène Lupin fellow is actually among the household now?’ asked Bill, his eyes sparkling. [a reference to the fictional gentleman thief and master of disguise created in 1905 by French writer Maurice Leblanc.] (Chapter 18)

And Christie has Battle deliver a little lecture on the subject.

‘In the meantime,’ said Anthony, ‘I am still the amateur assistant?’
‘That’s it, Mr. Cade.’
‘Watson to your Sherlock, in fact?’
‘Detective stories are mostly bunkum,’ said Battle unemotionally. ‘But they amuse people,’ he added, as an afterthought. ‘And they’re useful sometimes.’
‘In what way?’ asked Anthony curiously.
‘They encourage the universal idea that the police are stupid. When we get an amateur crime, such as a murder, that’s very useful indeed.’

As I’ve said elsewhere, keeping on mentioning how your story is different from cheap thrillers doesn’t really differentiate it, but only signposts the similarities.

That said, maybe I’m missing the point and all these references are in fact just a type of joke – it’s a comedy stopgap to have the characters constantly referring to the clichés of crime novels and detective movies, self consciously mocking their own bravery or actions.

He wriggled into a lurid silk dressing-gown, and picked up a poker. ‘The orthodox weapon,’ he observed. (Bill Eversleigh, chapter 17)

And:

‘What’s this I hear about Virginia bolting off in the middle of the night? She’s not been kidnapped, has she?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Bundle. ‘She left a note pinned to the pincushion in the orthodox fashion.’ (Chapter 27)

And:

‘And don’t scream or faint or anything. I won’t let anyone hurt you.’
‘My hero!’ murmured Virginia.

And:

‘The plot thickens,’ said Anthony lightly.

Comedy

Or just jokes:

‘There’s an extraordinary lot of character in ears, Mr. Cade.’
‘Don’t look so hard at mine, Battle,’ complained Anthony. ‘You make me quite nervous.’

The book is stuffed with comic repartee:

‘I say, Virginia, I do love you so awfully—’
‘Not this morning, Bill. I’m not strong enough. Anyway, I’ve always told you the best people don’t propose before lunch.’

Or:

‘I can’t think,’ said Lord Caterham, ‘why nobody nowadays ever sits still after a meal. It’s a lost art.’

Agatha Christie is by far a more comic writer than Noel Coward ever was. Coward’s plays overflow with rancorous bickering but contain pitifully few really funny bits of repartee. Whereas Christie’s novels overflow with good-humoured comedy everywhere.

‘Half a second,’ said Anthony. “I’ve got a confession to make to you, Virginia. Something that everyone else knows, but that I haven’t yet told you.’
‘I don’t mind how many strange women you’ve loved so long as you don’t tell me about them.’
‘Women!’ said Anthony, with a virtuous air. ‘Women indeed? You ask James here what kind of women I was going about with last time he saw me.’
‘Frumps,’ said Jimmy solemnly. ‘Utter frumps. Not one a day under forty-five.’
‘Thank you, Jimmy,’ said Anthony, ‘you’re a true friend.’

‘I’m taking the Panhard up to town after lunch,’ she remarked. ‘Anyone want a lift? Wouldn’t you like to come, Mr. Cade? We’ll be back by dinner-time.’
‘No, thanks,’ said Anthony. ‘I’m quite happy and busy down here.’
‘The man fears me,’ said Bundle. ‘Either my driving or my fatal fascination! Which is it?’
‘The latter,’ said Anthony. ‘Every time.’

Women’s roles

Besides beauty, she possessed courage and brains.

Noel Coward gets credit for the unabashed modernity of his women characters, who have short hair, wear short skirts, smoke and drink and openly talk about shocking subjects – yet I find exactly the same behaviour in Christie’s young 1920s women. Both Virginia and Bundle are no-nonsense, go-for-it young women who regard old chauvinist attitudes of the fuddy-duddy men around them as ludicrous.

‘Listen to me, Virginia,’ said Bill. ‘This is man’s work—’
‘Don’t be an idiot, Bill.’

They have to put up with no end of sexist generalisations which justify Virginia Woolf’s accusations in her feminist masterpiece Three Guineas.

• MCGRATH: ‘Like all women, she’d put no date and no address on most of the letters.’
• LOMAX: ‘Not that I approve of women in politics—St. Stephen’s is ruined, absolutely ruined, nowadays. But woman in her own sphere can do wonders…’

Even that nice Mr Anthony:

‘You’re a very unusual woman,’ said Anthony suddenly, turning and looking at her.
‘Why?’
‘You can refrain from asking questions.’

And are aware that the world they operate in, the culture they move in, is drenched with sexist put-downs:

VIRGINIA: ‘We women are usually supposed to be cats, but at any rate I’d done another woman a good turn this afternoon.’

‘I know,’ said Virginia. ‘Women are so indiscreet! I’ve often heard George say so.’

And Virginia is asked by Lomax to ‘Delilah’ the memoirs out of this man McGrath i.e. to sweet-talk or seduce them out of him – a suggestion she rejects with disgust.

Thus Christie depicts the world of sexist assumptions which her independent women have to operate in. And yet they not only reject sexist generalisations or suggestions to the speaker’s face, more importantly they act with a fearlessness and freedom which completely contradicts the sexist slurs. And they drive like demons, witness Bundle’s crazy driving which sometimes hits the reckless speed of fifty miles an hour!

‘I shouldn’t recommend driving with you as a tonic for nervous old ladies, but personally I’ve enjoyed it. The last time I was in equal danger was when I was charged by a herd of wild elephants.’

‘Tim Revel was bowled over by Virginia—he was Irish, you know, and most attractive, with a genius for expressing himself well. Virginia was quite young—eighteen. She couldn’t go anywhere without seeing Tim in a state of picturesque misery, vowing he’d shoot himself or take to drink if she didn’t marry him. Girls believe these things—or used to—we’ve advanced a lot in the last eight years.’

Class

Of course the fearlessness of the two posh young women, Virginia and Bundle, stems in large part because of their upper-class provenance. Their superb confidence derives from their fearless upbringing. At one point Christie has Superintendent Battle give this definitive formulation:

‘Well, you see, Mr. Cade, most of my work has lain amongst these people. What they call the upper classes, I mean. You see, the majority of people are always wondering what the neighbours will think. But tramps and aristocrats don’t—they just do the first thing that comes into their heads, and they don’t bother to think what anyone thinks of them. I’m not meaning just the idle rich, the people who give big parties, and so on, I mean those that have had it born and bred in them for generations that nobody else’s opinion counts but their own. I’ve always found the upper classes the same—fearless, truthful and sometimes extraordinarily foolish.’

Battle’s methods

Battle’s procedure:

‘It’s rather too soon to have ideas, Mr Isaacstein. I’ve not got beyond asking myself the first question.’
‘What is that?’
‘Oh, it’s always the same. Motive. Who benefits by the death of Prince Michael?’
(Chapter 15)

And:

‘I’m glad of that,’ said Anthony. ‘I’ve a feeling that ever since I met you you’ve been laying little traps for me. On the whole I’ve managed to avoid falling into them, but the strain has been acute.’
Battle smiled grimly.
‘That’s how you get a crook in the end, sir. Keep him on the run, to and fro, turning and twisting. Sooner or later, his nerve goes, and you’ve got him.’

And humour:

‘You’ve got a plan, eh?’
‘I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’ve got a plan. But I’ve got an idea. It’s a very useful thing sometimes, an idea.’

Heightism

A symptom of the pulpy, silly, tongue-in-cheek feel of the whole thing is how many people are commandingly tall:

The hero:

They all admired Mr Cade so much, his tall lean figure, his sun-tanned face, the light-hearted manner with which he settled disputes and cajoled them all into good temper.

And the heroine:

Virginia Revel was just twenty-seven. She was tall and of an exquisite slimness—indeed, a poem might have been written to her slimness, it was so exquisitely proportioned.

And the other heroine:

The door opened and a girl came into the room. She was tall, slim and dark, with an attractive boyish face, and a very determined manner. This was Lady Eileen Brent, commonly known as Bundle, Lord Caterham’s eldest daughter.

The blackmailer:

Anthony observed him more closely. He was a tall man, supple like all waiters, with a clean-shaven, mobile face. An Italian, Anthony thought, not a Frenchman.

The police inspector:

A tall portly man, Inspector Badgworthy, with a heavy regulation tread. Inclined to breathe hard in moments of professional strain.

The American:

On the threshold stood a tall man with black hair neatly parted in the middle, china blue eyes with a particularly innocent expression, and a large placid face.

The dead prince’s aide-de-camp:

He returned shortly accompanied by a tall fair man with high cheek-bones, and very deep-set blue eyes, and an impassivity of countenance which almost rivalled Battle’s.

It is a Photoshopped world of fine physical specimens.

Phrases

revenons à nos moutons = French for ‘Let’s get back to the subject at hand’

A ‘cat’ is, from the context, a gossipy bitch.

Even women like her because she isn’t a bit of a cat.

I think characters in Coward use the word in the same sense and, as we will see, Christie uses it freely in virtually all her early novels.

Marrows

When Anthony talks about retiring the first image that comes into his mind is retiring to a nice place in the country and ‘growing vegetable marrows’. Now this was precisely Poirot’s activity in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd where he threw one of his marrows over the fence of his rented cottage and accidentally hit his neighbour, Dr Sheppard, the extremely unreliable narrator of that story.

The Tube

Couldn’t help laughing out loud when Anthony has a little speech explaining why the single thing which undermined his lifelong belief in equality and democracy was getting on the London Tube.

‘You see, when I was very young, I had democratic ideas. Believed in the purity of ideals, and the equality of all men. I especially disbelieved in Kings and Princes.’
‘And since then?’ asked Battle shrewdly.
‘Oh, since then, I’ve travelled and seen the world. There’s damned little equality going about. 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 final 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 just yet awhile—but by judicious force you can coerce them into behaving more or less decently to one another to go on with. I still believe in the Brotherhood of Man, but it’s not coming yet awhile. Say another ten thousand years or so. It’s no good being impatient. Evolution is a slow process.’

Well, it’s a hundred years later and the situation is, if anything, worse. The company I work for are forcing us to come back to the office because they apparently think that spending an hour with your face in someone else’s armpit, in hundred degree heat on the Northern Line, twice a day, will miraculously increase their employees’ productivity and creativity.

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Credit

‘The Secret of Chimneys’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1925 by William Collins and Son.

Related links

• The Secret of Chimneys online

Related reviews

• Agatha Christie reviews
• 1920s reviews