The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie
The Book
Anthony Cade, well born, broke, aristocrat makes his way from South Africa, where is making ends meet being a tour guide, to England to run a couple of errands for his friend Jimmy McGrath. Errand one, deliver the manuscript of Herzoslovakian politician to the publisher. A simple enough task, except that everyone from Herzoslovakia wants this thing, and is willing to violence to get it. The other errand is to return the scandalous love letters of one Virginia Revel to her so she knows they have been destroyed. Neither errand goes according to plan, but Anthony meet Virginia, saves her reputation by helping her dispose of dead body, and gives her moral support when her weekend party is interrupted by yet another ghastly murder, this time of a high ranking personage. From here, he goes on an adventure to see if he can outsmart Scotland Yard. Oh, and did I mention there is a famous, lost jewel at the bottom of this mystery? Well there is.
My Thoughts
Spoilers Ahead!
All in all this is Agatha Christie's most hijinks filled book to date. The plot is coincidental, all over the place and a little bit more than convoluted. I have a theory on why this book is so (relatively) bad. I think this is what I would call a polished first draft. I think Agatha Christie owed one more book to Bodly Head, and she just tossed this book at them, no revisions. Let me explain why:
1) It's Hercule Poirot's turn to have a novel. She was producing these, write a one off/thriller, write a Poirot. She started with Poirot The Mysterious Affair at Styles, followed by The Secret Adversary, a thriller, then Murder on the Links. a Poirot and finally, The Man in the Brown Suit, a thriller. But Poirot was franchise, the thing a new publisher would want, so she didn't waste a puzzle mystery, something that is labor intensive, and for which she has a following, on a publisher whom she didn't like.
2) The plot of this book definitely "jumps the shark", there are just too many coincidences. For example, Jimmy McGrath just happens to be friends with two people who both just happen to be from the same fictitous Balkan nation, Herzoslovakia, both of whom have both halves of the same mystery? Clearly, she barely reread it. If it were me, I would have pulled that back a little bit, and had Dutch Pedro and Count Stylptich be the same person. I might keep the dying in the middle of nowhere Africa from the Dutch Pedro story but having just one person in charge of both the memoirs and the letters just makes sense. And since the letters from the fake Virginia Revel were scandalous, it would have increased the credibility that the memoir would be more than an embarrassment to many people.
3) This book attempts to the same breezy tone as the previous books, but it is a slog to read. For some reason the sentences aren't particularly tight. It's not word choice, or punctuation, it's just not as much fun as the other books. My personal theory on this, is that Bodly Head had absolutely no incentive to improve the book. They knew, based on Christie's past sales, they were likely to get a certain amount of sales out of it. So what if it didn't sell as many as the previous books? As long as they made their profit they didn't care. And Christie was moving on from them anyway. She didn't have any reason to do a rewrite. So collectively, they just decided to polish the prose a bit, check for grammatical errors and ship this baby out of the door. And for that, I think this book was the worse for it.
There you have it, my reasons, without regard to what any of Agatha Christie's own writings might convey on the subject. If you believe I am wrong, comment down below.
How Much My Library Card Saved Me
As you can see from the photos, this is another in the leatherette edition, circa mid 1980s, so we have to do a bit of math to figure it out. So when I total the other books on this receipt, and subtract out, I get $12. This copy has not been well read. It must be some deep love of mysteries that keeps it in the library, the desire to keep as much of the collections together as possible. The pages are relatively stiff compared to the other books and the pages are pristine. It seems many people skip over this book on their way to the next one.
This book $12.00
This Summer $240.01
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