1925: The Secret of Chimneys 

Publisher: The Bodley Head, 1925 (UK); Dodd, Mead & Co., 1925 (US)

Series: Superintendent Battle 

Category: Novel

Cross refs: The Seven Dials Mystery; One, Two, Buckle My Shoe; The Labours of Hercules

Warning, spoilers!

A political thriller? A romp reminiscent of P. G. Wodehouse? Troublingly antisemitic? The Secret of Chimneys has been perceived and received in a variety of ways. Some love this book for its ‘thick fog of mystery, cross-purposes and romance’.[1] Others observe that it is ‘littered with loose ends, unlikely motivations and unconvincing characters’.[2] For me, the joy of The Secret of Chimneys emanates from its supporting cast – the witty and indefatigable Champagne socialist Lady Eileen Brent (‘Bundle’ to all who know her), the browbeaten, shabbily dressed Lord Caterham with his dry asides and desire to be left alone, the hapless Bill Eversleigh, ‘age at a guess, twenty-five, big and rather ungainly in his movements, a pleasurably ugly face, a splendid set of white teeth and a pair of honest brown eyes’. Even the overbearing, purple-faced politico George Lomax plays his part with aplomb. Of course they are all ‘types’, just as ‘the venerable pile of Chimneys’ itself is a type – so much so that Christie doesn’t even bother to describe it:

Descriptions of that historic place can be found in any guide book. It is also No. 3 in Historic Homes of England, price 21s. On Thursdays, chars-à-bancs come over from Middlingham and view those portions of it which are open to the public. In view of all these facilities, to describe Chimneys would be superfluous.

But somehow, for me, these types seem to work.

The inspiration for the actual building of Chimneys is not known, however the book’s dedication – ‘To my Nephew. In memory of an inscription at Compton Castle and a day at the Zoo’ – may give some indication. Christie was close to her nephew, Jack Watts (1903–1961), the son of her sister Madge (known by the family as ‘Punkie’), and she spent a great deal of time with him at his family home, Abney Hall (fig. 1). While the dedication points to Compton Castle (fig. 2) , a Grade I-listed fortified manor in Devon, as the basis for Chimneys, it has also been suggested that Jack’s Greater Manchester home of Abney Hall is an equally likely contender. Perhaps the final building took architectural features from both.   

A further supporting act, the suspicious American Mr Hiram Fish, is revealed to be a ‘Pinkerton’s man’. The American private investigation company, Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, was founded in the 1850s by the Scottish-born detective Allan Pinkerton and the Chicago attorney Edward Rucker. Grown out of a desire for businessmen to keep a watchful eye on their employees, during its early life it was used primarily to infiltrate unions and control strikers. In the early twentieth century, however, it rebranded and refocused its attentions more broadly into detection and criminal investigation. It is in this role that Fish is conducting his inquiries, hot on the trail of the criminal mastermind King Victor (this is an Agatha Christie thriller, so of course there has to be a criminal mastermind with a sobriquet).  

Chimneys also sees the introduction of another unassailable sleuth in the form of Superintendent Battle, the squarely built Scotland Yard man, ‘with a face so singularly devoid of expression as to be quite remarkable’. Battle is quietly thoughtful and highly intelligent, though he is happy for the general public to believe otherwise. His character is largely impenetrable, and it is only when he reappears in later novels that we begin to learn a little more about his background and personality.  

A review of the characters wouldn’t be complete without mention of the stars of this story, the handsome adventurer Anthony Cade and the beautiful Virginia Revel. Of the latter, Christie gives so much detail in her description it is hard to imagine she didn’t have a particular person in mind as she wrote:  

She was tall and of an exquisite slimness – indeed, a poem might have been written to her slimness, it was so exquisitely proportioned. Her hair was of real bronze … she had a determined little chin, a lovely nose, slanting blue eyes that showed a gleam of deepest cornflower between the half-closed lids, and a delicious and quite indescribable mouth that tilted ever so slightly at one corner in what is known as ‘the signature of Venus’.

Here we also have first mention of ‘The Blitz Hotel’, a fictionalised play on London’s Ritz, though in a location that appears closer to The Savoy, somewhere between the Strand and Embankment, rather than on Picadilly where The Ritz is found. The Blitz features again in the 1929 short-story collection Partners in Crime.

Crucial to the plot is another fictionalised location, the country of Herzoslovakia. Anthony Cade describes it thus:

It’s one of the Balkan States … Principal rivers, unknown. Principal mountains, also unknown, but fairly numerous. Capital, Ekarest. Population, chiefly brigands. Hobby, assassinating Kings and having Revolutions. Last King, Nicholas IV. Assassinated about seven years ago. Since then it’s been a Republic. 

There is perhaps an echo of Serbian history here, with Christie’s Obolovitch dynasty and the assassination of Nicolas IV and his wife, Queen Varaga, at the instigation of the Comrades of the Red Hand reminding us of the Serbian Obrenović dynasty, which ended in 1903 with the assassination of Alexander I (1876–1903) and Queen Draga (1867–1903) by the secret military society the Black Hand.[3]

Yet, while Herzoslovakia has a flavour of Serbian royal dynasties, it is likely that Christie drew inspiration from contemporary Romanian politics when it came to the plotline about accessing Balkan oil by British interests.[4] The years 1923–4 saw the Romanian government move to nationalise its oil reserves, regulating their exploitation in a way that was more favourable to the country’s own interests, and to the detriment of outside parties. To avoid a similar fate befalling the fictional Herzoslovakia, George Lomax and his cronies move to fund the restoration of the Herzoslovakian monarchy and, in doing so, guarantee their access to that country’s oil.

In the novel, Cade accepts his role with high-handed assurance of a man educated in Britain at the time of Empire, and all of the moralising that goes with it:  

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 … 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.

Virginia too delights in the idea of ‘teaching the brigands not to be brigands, and the assassins not to assassinate, and generally improving the moral tone of the country’.

Such an endeavour – perhaps inspired by the example of the popular Queen Marie of Romania (1875–1938; fig. 3), born to the British Royal Family and married to Ferdinand I of Romania in 1893 – is ‘perhaps little more than the stuff of colonial fantasy – a fantasy in which it is enough for the English-educated to enter a Balkan country and take control for its future to be secured’.[5] There is something uncomfortably imperial about this element of Chimneys. On the one hand there is a ‘disappearing into the sunset’ feel to the end of this book (the usual hasty proposal and marriage), and on the other there is the lingering question of whether the restoration of the monarchy – and a very British-feeling monarchy at that – is really the right thing for Herzoslovakia, beyond enabling the British to access its oil.[6]

Herzoslovakia was to feature again in Christie’s short story ‘The Stymphalean Birds’, published in the Strand Magazine in April 1940, it also receives brief mention in the novel One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940) and again in the 1947 short-story collection The Labours of Hercules.

[1] The Times Literary Supplement, 9 July 1925, p. 466.

[2] John Curran, Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making: More Stories and Secrets from Her Notebooks (London, 2012) pp. 106–7. 

[3] Graham St. John Stott and Aysar Yaseen, ‘The Balkan Theme in The Secret of Chimneys’, Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation 2 (2016), p. 3, doi: 10.15291/sic/2.6.lc.3 [accessed 21 May 2026].

[4] Stott and Yaseen 2016, p. 3.

[5] Stott and Yaseen 2016, pp. 7–8.

[6] Stott and Yaseen 2016, p. 7.