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The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (1926)

‘You will find, M. le docteur, if you have much to do with cases of this kind, that they all resemble each other in one thing.’
‘What is that?’ I asked curiously.
‘Everyone concerned in them has something to hide.’
‘Have I?’ I asked, smiling.
Poirot looked at me attentively.
‘I think you have,’ he said quietly.
(The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Chapter 7)

‘Everything is simple, if you arrange the facts methodically.’
(Poirot wisdom, Chapter 7)

Poirot carefully straightened a china ornament on one of the bookcases.
(Poirot’s symmetry OCD, Chapter 8)

When everyone was assembled, Poirot rose and bowed. ‘Messieurs, mesdames, I have called you together for a certain purpose.’
(First instance of the calling together of all the suspects which was to become a cliché of the genre, Chapter 12)

‘I implored you to be frank with me. What one does not tell to Papa Poirot he finds out.’
(His rather creepy habit of calling himself Papa Poirot when talking to young women, Chapter 18)

‘Now, madame,’ he smiled at her, his head on one side, his forefinger wagging eloquently, ‘no questions. And do not torment yourself. Be of good courage, and place your faith in Hercule Poirot.’
(Poirot’s saviour complex, Chapter 22)

This is the third novel to feature Agatha Christie’s famous detective, Hercule Poirot, but unlike its predecessors and most of its sequels, it is not narrated by Poirot’s sidekick, Captain Arthur Hastings, but by a completely new character, a Dr James Sheppard.

In the quiet village of King’s Abbot, bluff old Roger Ackroyd is found dead, stabbed in the neck, in the study of his country house, Fernly Park. On the day of his death he had had a conversation with the narrator, Dr Sheppard, in which he had shared a terrible secret. Only the day before, a long-time inhabitant of the village, a Mrs Ferrars, had committed suicide with an overdose of the sleeping pill veronal. Only a year earlier her husband, Ashley Ferrars, had died, supposedly of acute gastritis brought on by heavy drinking, although the narrator’s sister, Caroline Sheppard, in her lurid gossipy way, always claimed his wife had murdered him.

In the year since her husband’s death, Mrs Ferrars had become very friendly with Roger Ackroyd, whose own wife had died leaving him to raise her son by a previous marriage i.e. his stepson, Captain Ralph Paton. They’d become close enough for Roger to have proposed marriage to her and she, on the second attempt, to accept.

Now, to his horror, Dr Sheppard hears Roger Ackroyd telling him that just the day before, Mrs Ferrars had confessed to him (Roger) that she did murder her husband, with poison, after years of drunken abuse. Not only that, but somebody found out about the murder and has been blackmailing her for a year.

Mrs Ferrars tells Roger all this but can’t bring herself to name the blackmailer. Then she kills herself. The next day Roger calls in the doctor and tells him everything but, even as they’re talking, the butler delivers the day’s mail which includes a letter from the suicided Mrs Ferrars. He opens the letter and starts to read it aloud to the doctor but when it gets to the bit which names the blackmailer he stops, then insists the doctor leaves.

A few hours later the doctor is home in bed when he gets a phone call telling him that Roger Ackroyd has been murdered and hurries over to Ackroyd’s house to find it is, indeed, true. So: who murdered Roger Ackroyd, and why, and who was blackmailing Mrs Ferrars? These are just the starting points of what develops into a story which some critics claim was Christie’s best and is regularly voted among the top crime novels ever written.

Where does Poirot come in?

The first quarter of the book is narrated by this Dr Sheppard with no mention or appearance of Poirot but mentions of a Mr Porrott who has moved into the house next to Sheppard’s, The Larches. Sheppard’s sister, Caroline, as the village gossip, claims to know about Porrott but in fact all that everyone knows is that he keeps himself to himself. We learn that he is literally cultivating his garden as, in one comic episode, he offers Dr Sheppard one of the huge marrows he has been cultivating.

It is only in Chapter 7, when the story is well underway, that one of the other characters (the murdered man’s niece, Flora) informs Sheppard of the true identity of his neighbour: that he is the world-famous private detective, that he moved to the village a year ago, that Roger knew about him but Poirot swore him to secrecy.

This raises several questions, the most obvious of which is: Why did Christie choose to have her famous detective character retire after just two novels? Specially seeing as he was destined to appear in over 30 further novels, two plays and over 50 short stories? Though she couldn’t have anticipated this at the time, she must have realised she had a makings of a recurring figure, so why retire him at virtually the start of his fictional career?

Anyway, once Poirot’s been introduced he quickly comes to dominate the narrative and the imaginative space of the novel, easily becoming the most intriguing and central figure, with his air of exaggerated self importance, his habit of referring to himself in the third person (as Napoleon notoriously did), and his complete domination of Dr Sheppard who is transformed from a reasonably capable and thoughtful local doctor into the kind of dim sidekick figure which Poirot appears to require.

Poirot’s self importance

‘See now, mademoiselle,’ he said very gently, ‘it is Papa Poirot who asks you this. The old Papa Poirot who has much knowledge and much experience. I would not seek to entrap you, mademoiselle. Will you not trust me?’ (Chapter 12)

He looked over his shoulder and raised one eyebrow quizzically. ‘An opened window,’ he said. ‘A locked door. A chair that apparently moved itself. To all three I say, ‘Why?’ and I find no answer.’ – He shook his head, puffed out his chest, and stood blinking at us. He looked ridiculously full of his own importance. It crossed my mind to wonder whether he was really any good as a detective. Had his big reputation been built up on a series of lucky chances? (Chapter 8)

‘Les femmes,’ generalized Poirot. ‘They are marvelous! They invent haphazard—and by miracle they are right. Not that it is that, really. Women observe subconsciously a thousand little details, without knowing that they are doing so. Their subconscious mind adds these little things together—and they call the result intuition. Me, I am very skilled in psychology. I know these things.’ He swelled his chest out importantly, looking so ridiculous, that I found it difficult not to burst out laughing. (Chapter 13)

‘It is useless to deny. Hercule Poirot knows.’ (Chapter 17)

‘A little idea of mine, that was all. Me, I am famous for my little ideas.’ (Chapter 18)

Where is Hastings?

Why is the novel being narrated by Dr Sheppard and not Captain Hastings? Because at the end of the previous novel in the series, The Murder on the Links’, with wild improbability, Hastings had gone off to live in South America with the woman he fell in love with during the novel, Dulcie Duveen.

For the first quarter of the novel Poirot doesn’t appear and everything is narrated by Dr Sheppard. Once Poirot has been introduced, Christie quickly has him assimilating Sheppard to the witness-and-sounding-board role vacated by Hastings.

‘You must have indeed been sent from the good God to replace my friend Hastings,’ he said, with a twinkle. ‘I observe that you do not quit my side.’ (Chapter 8)

‘Perhaps I’m intruding,” I said. ‘Not at all,’ cried Poirot heartily. ‘You and I, M. le docteur, we investigate this affair side by side. Without you I should be lost.’ (Chapter 10)

In other words, Poirot needs an idiot accomplice. Inside the fictional world of the novel, I suppose it may help Poirot to think and work things through, to have an imbecile constantly proposing completely erroneous theories. On a practical level, it also allows him to in effect be in two places at the same time whenever that’s required, sending Sheppard off to interview people while Poirot does something else, or wants to stay in the background.

Also, towards the end of the novel, Poirot pays Hastings a back-handed compliment and summary of his usefulness:

‘It is that there are moments when a great longing for my friend Hastings comes over me. That is the friend of whom I spoke to you—the one who resides now in the Argentine. Always, when I have had a big case, he has been by my side. And he has helped me—yes, often he has helped me. For he had a knack, that one, of stumbling over the truth unawares—without noticing it himself, bien entendu. At times he has said something particularly foolish, and behold that foolish remark has revealed the truth to me! And then, too, it was his practice to keep a written record of the cases that proved interesting.’ (Chapter 23)

But it may also be that Christie had grasped how much more entertaining the Hastings figure makes her books. He is a bit dim, a bit slow, and so acts as the reader’s entry into the fictional world of the novel, and into Poirot’s mind.

For all these reasons, as the novel progresses, Poirot consolidates Sheppard’s position as the Dr Watson-Captain Hastings substitute.

‘Do you really wish to aid me? To take part in this investigation?’
‘Yes, indeed,’ I said eagerly. ‘There’s nothing I should like better. You don’t know what a dull old fogey’s life I lead. Never anything out of the ordinary.’
‘Good, we will be colleagues then.’ (Chapter 10)

But as reassuringly slow-witted and dim as the original.

Call me dense if you like. I didn’t see. (Chapter 13)

The pleasure of familiarity

Fictional series featuring recurring figures are so enjoyable because it obviously feeds something deep in our psyches to meet the same characters again and again and get to learn their quirks and characteristics. All the world’s mythologies feature the same gods or heroes cropping up again and again, displaying the same trademark behaviour. Ancient drama featured stock characters who were given different names but always behaved in a reassuringly familiar and predictable manner (the young lovers, the disapproving father, the clever slave etc).

In a way, given the psychological reassurance they provide, it’s an oddity that so much of the literature in the interim between then and modern times didn’t feature recurring characters. On reflection, maybe it was a role taken by figures in the Christian mythology: most of the population from the Dark Ages to the late Victorian era were illiterate, and so their world of fictional characters was limited to an (admittedly quite large) roster of characters from the Old and New Testaments, along with stock characters from fairy tales and folk mythology.

All this changed (in Britain) with the increase in literacy triggered by the 1870 Education Act and the consequent explosion of genre literature from the 1880s and 1890s onwards, the creation of the sub-literary genres of adventure stories, horror, fantasy, science fiction and so on. And these provided fertile fields for the creation of thousands of characters which could be used in recurring adventures – first in the obvious detective stories, starting with Sherlock Holmes; then in a new, debased and industrialised form in comics – from the funnies of turn of the century American newspapers, through the invention of comic strip characters, DC (1934) and Marvel (1939) in the States, alongside comic strip characters in Europe such as Tintin in France/Belgium (1929).

All this was amplified in movies made with recurring characters (all those Sherlock Holmes movies starring Basil Rathbone), a device which was handed over to the new medium of television after the second war, across all possible genres – from comic to Westerns to science fiction. Recurring characters are easier for creators to work with, reassuring for audiences, and profitable.

Anyway, Poirot is one such protagonist, one such figure who went on to have a lengthy career in Christie’s hands, in an impressively long roster of novels and short stories, stretching from 1920 to 1972 – but after her death flourished in an apparently unstoppable stream of TV adaptations and movies, up to the current series of movies starring Kenneth Branagh.

So to come right back to this novel, it is part of the fun but also feeds something deep in us, is deeply reassuring, to feel we are in the presence of someone in control, in command of the situation, who can help us, who will always ensure that Right and Justice prevail.

Thus it is that Christie knew very well what she was doing, when she created his three or four salient characteristics, repeated them within the novels and across the novels, and hence the lovely reassuring entertainment-stroke-comfort that they provide.

The little man was leaning forward. His eyes shone with a queer green light. (Chapter 8)

Over the wall, to my left, there appeared a face. An egg-shaped head, partially covered with suspiciously black hair, two immense moustaches, and a pair of watchful eyes. It was our mysterious neighbour, Mr Porrott. (Chapter 3)

I looked at him inquiringly, but he began to fuss about a few microscopic drops of water on his coat sleeve. The man reminded me in some ways of a cat. His green eyes and his finicking habits. (Chapter 9)

Symmetry OCD

According to the internet:

Symmetry OCD is a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) characterized by a strong need for things to be perfectly aligned, arranged, or symmetrical. Individuals with symmetry OCD experience intense anxiety and distress when items are not correctly aligned, incomplete, or appear imperfect. This can lead to compulsions like repeatedly arranging objects, touching or tapping things, or even performing certain actions with both hands to achieve a sense of balance.

This is clearly what Poirot has:

I looked curiously at [Poirot]. He was rearranging a few objects on the table, setting them straight with precise fingers. His eyes were shining. (Chapter 13)

Poirot’s OCD is not so pronounced as to interfere with his everyday life, but Christie touches on it just frequently enough to keep us aware of it.

‘Now, I beg you, let us have everything of the most exact.’ (Poirot organising a reconstruction in Chapter 15)

And, importantly, his symmetry OCD is connected with Poirot’s desire for everything about a case to be arranged ‘just so’, for the facts and people’s statements to line up and make sense. Anything at all which doesn’t make sense, doesn’t fit the theory, jars with his putative narrative, troubles him.

‘But then it is possible after all—yes, certainly it is possible—but then—ah! I must rearrange my ideas. Method, order; never have I needed them more. Everything must fit in—in its appointed place—otherwise I am on the wrong tack.’

Again and again we see other people – Hastings, Giraud of the Sûreté, Japp of Scotland Yard (in other Poirot novels) and the local coppers – dismissing this or that detail as irrelevant, because it doesn’t fit with the theory they’ve devised and are imposing on the facts. But Poirot can’t allow this. This is why it’s the details that don’t make sense, don’t fit into an interpretive pattern, which trouble and interest him the most.

Thus a chair in the murdered man’s study had been moved sometime between the murder and the doctor and butler entering the room and discovering the body, an apparently small detail, but:

‘Raymond or Blunt must have pushed it back,’ I suggested. ‘Surely it isn’t important?’
‘It is completely unimportant,’ said Poirot. ‘That is why it is so interesting,’ he added softly.
(Chapter 7)

(I began to notice the importance of the word ‘seem’. Whenever the narrator says that Poirot ‘seems’ not to notice or not to care, or ‘seems’ to lose interest in a conversation with s suspect, or ‘seems’ to move on – that is almost infallibly a tell-tale sign that he has noticed something important.)

As to the importance of theory and interpretation in these novels, Poirot gives a handy quote:

‘Of facts, I keep nothing to myself. But to everyone his own interpretation of them.’ (Chapter 21)

Chimpanzees and gossip

Our village, King’s Abbot, is, I imagine, very much like any other village. Our big town is Cranchester, nine miles away. We have a large railway station, a small post office, and two rival general stores. Able-bodied men are apt to leave the place early in life, but we are rich in unmarried ladies and retired military officers. Our hobbies and recreations can be summed up in the one word, ‘gossip‘. (Chapter 2)

Gossip amounts to speculation about other people in a social group, or known in wider society. Gossip is:

casual or unconstrained conversation or reports about other people, typically involving details that are not confirmed as being true… idle talk or rumour, especially about the personal or private affairs of others…

My understanding of the hierarchies of ape groups, and especially chimpanzee society, is that they are incredibly complex, and that survival requires continual assessment of who is the alpha male, who his females and children are. Constant awareness of who’s on their way up, who’s on their way down, who’s mating with who, whose children are eligible or valid members of the in-group, and so on.

Everyone who writes about chimp social hierarches makes the obvious point that they are directly comparable to human social hierarchies, especially in what anthropologists know of our earliest hunter-gatherer societies.

Except that, unlike chimps, we can talk, and so can assess our own and everyone else’s place in the hierarchy at length and in mind-boggling detail. Human gossip can be seen as an extension of the same chimp-like faculty. Gossip is speculation about people’s activities and motives: ‘Are they having an affair? Why did they suddenly sell the house and move?’ etc.

To come back to the novel in hand, it isn’t difficult to see the genre of the detective story as a kind of intensification of the chimp strand in human nature or the human mind. Unlike chimps who live in the animal present, humans with their vastly bigger mental and symbolic and linguistic abilities, can range far and wide over the past, analyse the present, and speculate about the future. And when all this energy goes into speculating about the past, present and future of individuals – are they on the way up, or down? who stands to gain and who stands to lose? are the children – the next generation – overthrowing their parents, for power or money or love? who’s mating with who? – all this is gossip. And it is gossip which the narrator, in the first chapter of the book, goes out of his way to say is the chief recreation and pastime of everyone in his village.

All of which helps us to see, to understand, that what the narrator calls ‘gossip’, is in a sense, central to the whole genre of the detective story. Because what does a detective story consist of except endless speculation about people, their characters, qualities, and extravagant theories about their possible motivations and actions. The detective story is gossip on steroids. In the detective novel the common human urge to speculate about what people do and why goes into overdrive.

Which is one of the several psychological gratifications it offers (along with the reassuring comfort of meeting recurring, familiar and dependable characters, mentioned above).

The post-war era

Christie was born in 1890 and so was 28 when the Great War ended and 30 when her first detective novel was published. She was, in other words, from the pre-War generation and so these early novels record some of the startling social changes of the post-war era.

The 1920s woman

One of these was the striking new freedoms claimed by young women (presumably mostly middle class young women), the short haircuts, short skirts, lipstick and unabashed smoking in public.

The things young women read nowadays and profess to enjoy positively frighten me.
(Dr Sheppard, Chapter 4)

‘Flora is like all these young girls nowadays, with no veneration for their betters and thinking they know best on every subject under the sun.’
(Caroline Sheppard, Chapter 17)

Mahjong

Another was Christie’s keeping up with the new decade’s enthusiasm for games and activities. I commented on how the preceding novel, ‘The Murder on The Links’, drags in the game of golf which existed beforehand but underwent a great burst of popularity in the 1920s, with the spread of clubs and courses across the UK. (To be honest, the topic feels rather dragged into the book since the murder doesn’t actually take place on a golf course and isn’t carried out with a golf club or something colourful like that, but just with a common or garden dagger.)

And so she does something similar with the Chinese game of mahjong. This became a fad or craze in the West immediately after the First World War. The first Mahjong sets sold in the U.S. were sold by Abercrombie & Fitch starting in 1920, which was also the year that Joseph Park Babcock published his book ‘Rules of Mah-Jongg’, the earliest version of Mahjong known in America – and which was also, of course, the publication year of the first Poirot novel, ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’. The game quickly spread across America and to Britain.

All of which explains why Christie was being very up-to-date when she devoted an entire chapter (Chapter 16) to a game of mah jong held at Dr Sheppard’s house, featuring himself, his sister Caroline, bluff Colonel Carter and local gossip Miss Ganett as the players.

The ostensible purpose of the chapter is for all four characters to air their ‘theories’ about the murder of Roger Ackroyd (because, as I’ve discussed at length, these kinds of detective stories are just as much or more about the elaboration and assessment of different theories about murders, as they are about the murders themselves) but it’s done against the backdrop of a game of mahjong which doesn’t exactly explain the rules, but gives enough detail about the names of the tiles, the different hands and strategy, to begin to give you a feel for the game.

It’s also a funny scene, as the theories about the murder are juxtaposed with the players’ increasingly bad-tempered playing of the game and criticising each other. Surely millions of readers before me have pointed this out, but Christie is a very enjoyable comic writer. It’s mainly for the comedy that I read her.

Freud

And then another fad which swept across the West in various forms of bastardisation and simplification, Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis, namechecked in this brief exchange between Poirot and the police inspector to indicate Poirot’s openness to new thinking and the police’s innate conservatism.

‘Then there is the psychology of a crime. One must study that.’
‘Ah!’ said the inspector, ‘you’ve been bitten with all this psycho-analysis stuff? Now, I’m a plain man——’ (Chapter 8)

But later Poirot speaks in such a way as to indicate that he accepts psychoanalysis’s fundamental premise: the notion that the human mind is divided into a conscious and an unconscious part and that the unconscious part is often working, creating ideas and suppositions which the conscious mind isn’t aware that it’s doing.

‘Les femmes,’ generalized Poirot. ‘They are marvellous! They invent haphazard—and by miracle they are right. Not that it is that, really. Women observe subconsciously a thousand little details, without knowing that they are doing so. Their subconscious mind adds these little things together—and they call the result intuition.’ . (Chapter 13)

‘I was watching your face and you were not—like Inspector Raglan—startled and incredulous.’ I thought for a minute or two. ‘Perhaps you are right,’ I said at last. ‘All along I’ve felt that Flora was keeping back something—so the truth, when it came, was subconsciously expected. (Chapter 20)

And most plainly of all:

‘It explains, too,’ said Poirot, ‘why Major Blunt thought it was you who were in the study. Such scraps as came to him were fragments of dictation, and so his subconscious mind deduced that you were with him. His conscious mind was occupied with something quite different…’ (Chapter 23)

Poor old Ackroyd. I’m always glad that I gave him a chance. I urged him to read that letter before it was too late. Or let me be honest—didn’t I subconsciously realize that with a pig-headed chap like him, it was my best chance of getting him not to read it? (Chapter 27)

Like lots of writers and artists, Christie realised that you don’t have to understand the full complexity of Freud’s theory, for its basic outline to be very useful in writing, in creating characters and analysing their psychology and motivation.

Cocaine and heroin

Golf, mahjong, psychoanalysis – and Christie adds a fourth to her suite of topical references, cocaine! Roger Ackroyd’s housemaid is a prim and proper woman, Miss Russell. It’s only half way through the book that we discover (in a typical digression designed to throw us off the scent) that she has an illegitimate son, Charles Kent, who’s gone completely off the rails and become a drug addict.

Poirot first suspects this when he discovers a ‘quill’, a goose quill i.e. the hollow stem of a goose feather, in Roger Ackroyd’s summer house where, it slowly emerges, the housekeeper had had a bad-tempered encounter with her ne’er-do-well son on the night of Ackroyd’s murder. Poirot knows that drug addicts in America use these quills to snort their drug.

In fact there’s a quibble or mild confusion about drugs because when Miss Russell goes to consult Dr Sheppard about drugs, she mentions cocaine because she’d seen a piece about it in that morning’s newspaper. She does this because she doesn’t in fact know or understand which drug her son is addicted to. But the goose quill gives Poirot the more specific evidence that it’s actually heroin or, as he says, using the latest slang, ‘snow’.

He held out to me the little quill. I looked at it curiously. Then a memory of something I had read stirred in me. Poirot, who had been watching my face, nodded.
‘Yes, heroin ‘snow.’ Drug-takers carry it like this, and sniff it up the nose.’
‘Diamorphine hydrochloride,’ I murmured mechanically.
‘This method of taking the drug is very common on the other side. Another proof, if we wanted one, that the man came from Canada or the States.’ (Chapter 13)

And later, when discussing the movements of an unnamed stranger who was seen entering Ackroyd’s grounds:

‘It was fairly certain that he did go to the summer-house because of the goose quill. That suggested at once to my mind a taker of drugs—and one who had acquired the habit on the other side of the Atlantic where sniffing ‘snow’ is more common than in this country. The man whom Dr Sheppard met had an American accent, which fitted in with that supposition…’ (Chapter 23)

Golf, mahjong, psychoanalysis and heroin, an impressive roster of up-to-the-minute topics for 1926.

Heightism

Ackroyd’s housekeeper – ‘a tall woman, handsome but forbidding in appearance.’

Ursula Bourne – ‘A tall girl, with a lot of brown hair rolled tightly away at the back of her neck, and very steady grey eyes.’

Mrs Folliott – ‘She was a tall woman, with untidy brown hair, and a very winning smile.’

Kent, the suspect – ‘He was a young fellow, I should say not more than twenty-two or three. Tall, thin, with slightly shaking hands, and the evidences of considerable physical strength somewhat run to seed.’

In this world of tall people, great emphasis is placed on Poirot’s shortness and smallness.

The strange little man seemed to read my thoughts… My little neighbour nodded… He seemed an understanding little man… The little man went on with an almost grandiloquent smirk… ‘To see that funny little man?’ exclaimed Caroline… ‘I accept,’ said the little man quietly… The little detective shook his head at me gravely… The little man was leaning forward. His eyes shone with a queer green light… ‘Admirable,’ declared the little man, rubbing his hands.

You get the picture. Maybe all the emphasis on Poirot’s littleness is to emphasise his reliance not on brute strength but on brains. The key word, ‘little’, being used both for Poirot’s stature, but also part of his favourite phrase to describe his key piece of equipment for solving crimes.

The secretary [Geoffrey Raymond] was debonair as ever. ‘What’s the great idea?’ he said, laughing. ‘Some scientific machine? Do we have bands round our wrists which register guilty heart-beats? There is such an invention, isn’t there?’
‘I have read of it, yes,’ admitted Poirot. ‘But me, I am old-fashioned. I use the old methods. I work only with the little grey cells.’ (Chapter 23)

Roger and Edmund

http://www.crazyoik.co.uk/workshop/edmund_wilson_on_crime_fiction.htm

ITV

ITV dramatised most of the Poirot novels and short stories in their TV series starring David Suchet. ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ was dramatised as series 7, episode 1.

Credit

‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1926 by John Lane. References are to the 1966 Fontana paperback edition.

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The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie (1925)

‘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.

Credit

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

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by Simon on July 4, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 4, 2025

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