Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making: More Stories and Secrets From Her Notebooks (10 page)

Some ideas that feature in
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
would appear again throughout Christie’s career. The dying Emily Inglethorp calls out the name of her husband, ‘Alfred . . . Alfred’, before she finally succumbs. Is the use of his name an accusation, an invocation, a plea, a farewell; or is it entirely meaningless? Similar situations occur in several novels over the next 30 years. One novel,
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
, is built entirely around the dying words of the man found at the foot of the cliffs. In
Death Comes as the End
, the dying Satipy calls the name of the earlier victim, ‘Nofret’; as John Christow lies dying at the edge of the Angkatells’ swimming pool, in
The Hollow
, he calls out the name of his lover, ‘Henrietta.’ An extended version of the idea is found in
A Murder is Announced
when the last words of the soon-to-be-murdered Amy Murgatroyd, ‘she wasn’t there’, contain a vital clue and are subjected to close examination by Miss Marple. Both
Murder in Mesopotamia
– ‘the window’ – and
Ordeal by Innocence
– ‘the cup was empty’ and ‘the dove on the mast’ – give clues to the method of murder. And the agent Carmichael utters the enigmatic ‘Lucifer . . . Basrah’ before he expires in Victoria’s room in
They Came to Baghdad
.

The idea of a character looking over a shoulder and seeing someone or something significant makes its first appearance in Christie’s work when Lawrence looks horrified at something he notices in Mrs Inglethorp’s room on the night of her death. The alert reader should be able to tell what it is. This ploy is a Christie favourite and she enjoyed ringing the changes on the possible explanations. She predicated at least two novels –
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
and
A Caribbean Mystery –
almost entirely on this, and it
makes noteworthy appearances in
The Man in the Brown Suit
,
Appointment with Death
and
Death Comes as the End
, as well as a handful of short stories.

In the 1930 stage play
Black Coffee
,
²⁰
the only original script to feature Hercule Poirot, the hiding-place of the papers containing the missing formula is the same as the one devised by Alfred Inglethorp. And in an exchange very reminiscent of a similar one in
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
, it is a chance remark by Hastings that leads Poirot to this realisation.

In common with many crime stories of the period there are two floor-plans and no less than three reproductions of handwriting. Each has a part to play in the eventual solution. And here also we see for the first time Poirot’s remedy for steadying his nerves and encouraging precision in thought: the building of card-houses. At crucial points in both
Lord Edgware Dies
and
Three Act Tragedy
he adopts a similar strategy, each time with equally triumphant results. The important argument overheard by Mary Cavendish through an open window in Chapter 6 foreshadows a similar and equally important case of eavesdropping in
Five Little Pigs
.

In his 1953 survey of detective fiction,
Blood in their Ink
, Sutherland Scott describes
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
as ‘one of the finest “firsts” ever written’. Countless Christie readers over almost a century would enthusiastically agree.

The Secret of Chimneys

12 June 1925

A shooting party weekend at the country house Chimneys conceals the presence of international diplomats negotiating lucrative oil concessions with the kingdom of Herzoslovakia. When a dead body is found, Superintendent Battle’s subsequent investigation uncovers international jewel thieves, impersonation and kidnapping as well as murder.

‘These were easy to write, not requiring too much plotting or planning.’ In her
Autobiography
, Agatha Christie makes only this fleeting reference to
The Secret of Chimneys
,
first published in the summer of 1925 as the last of the six books she had contracted to produce for John Lane when they accepted
The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
In this ‘easy to write’ category she also included
The Seven Dials Mystery
, published in 1929, and, indeed, the later title features many of the same characters as the earlier.

The Secret of Chimneys
is not a formal detective story but a light-hearted thriller, a form to which she returned throughout her writing career with
The Man in the Brown Suit
,
The Seven Dials Mystery
,
Why Didn’t they ask Evans?
and
They Came to Baghdad
.
The Secret of Chimneys
has all the ingredients of a good thriller of the period – missing jewels, a mysterious manuscript, compromising letters, oil concessions, a foreign throne, villains, heroes, and mysterious and beautiful women. It has distinct echoes of
The Prisoner of Zenda
, Anthony Hope’s immortal swashbuckling novel that Tuppence recalls with affection in Chapter 2 of
Postern of Fate
– ‘one’s first introduction, really, to the romantic novel. The romance of Prince Flavia. The King of Ruritania, Rudolph Rassendyll . . .’ Christie organised these classic elements into a labyrinthine plot and also managed to incorporate a whodunit element.

The story begins in Africa, a country Christie had recently visited on her world tour in the company of her husband Archie. The protagonist, the somewhat mysterious Anthony Cade, undertakes to deliver a package to an address in London. This seemingly straightforward mission proves difficult and dangerous and before he can complete it he meets the beautiful Virginia Revel, who also has a commission for him – to dispose of the inconveniently dead body of her blackmailer. This achieved, they meet again at Chimneys, the country estate of Lord Caterham and his daughter Lady Eileen ‘Bundle’ Brent. From this point on, we are in more ‘normal’ Christie territory, the country house with a group of temporarily isolated characters – and one of them a murderer.

That said, it must be admitted that a hefty suspension of disbelief is called for if some aspects of the plot are to be accepted. We are asked to believe that a young woman will pay a blackmailer a large sum of money (£40 in 1930 has the purchasing power today of roughly £1,500) for an indiscretion that she did not commit, just for the experience of being blackmailed (Chapter 7), and that two chapters later when the blackmailer is found inconveniently, and unconvincingly, dead in her sitting room, she asks the first person who turns up on her doorstep (literally) to dispose of the body, while she blithely goes away for the weekend. By its nature this type of thriller is light-hearted, but
The Secret of Chimneys
demands much indulgence on the part of the reader.

The hand of Christie the detective novelist is evident in elements of the narration. Throughout the book the reliability of Anthony Cade is constantly in doubt and as early as Chapter 1 he jokes with his tourist group (and, by extension, the reader) about his real name. This is taken as part of his general banter but, as events unfold, he is revealed to be speaking nothing less than the truth. For the rest of the book Christie makes vague statements about Cade and when we are given his thoughts they are, in retrospect, ambiguous.

Anthony looked up sharply.

‘Herzoslovakia?’ he said with a curious ring in his voice. [Chapter 1]

‘. . . was it likely that any of them would recognise him now if they were to meet him face to face?’ [Chapter 5]

‘No connexion with Prince Michael’s death, is there?’

His hand was quite steady. So were his eyes. [Chapter 18]

‘The part of Prince Nicholas of Herzoslovakia.’

The matchbox fell from Anthony’s hand, but his amazement was fully equalled by that of Battle. [Chapter 19]

‘I’m really a king in disguise, you know’ [Chapter 23]

And how many readers will wonder about the curious scene at the end of Chapter 16 when Anchoukoff, the manservant, tells him he ‘will serve him to the death’ and Anthony ponders on ‘the instincts these fellows have’? Anthony’s motives remain unclear until the final chapter, and the reader, despite the hints contained in the above quotations, is unlikely to divine his true identity and purpose.

There are references, unconscious or otherwise, to other Christie titles. The rueful comments in Chapter 5 when Anthony remarks, ‘I know all about publishers – they sit on manuscripts and hatch ’em like eggs. It will be at least a year before the thing is published,’ echo Christie’s own experiences with John Lane and the publication of
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
five years earlier. The ploy of leaving a dead body in a railway left-luggage office, adopted by Cade in Chapter 9, was used in the 1923 Poirot short story ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’. Lord Caterham’s description of the finding of the body in Chapter 10 distinctly foreshadows a similar scene almost 20 years later in
The Body in the Library
when Colonel Bantry shares his unwelcome experience. And Virginia Revel’s throwaway comments about governesses and companions in Chapter 22 – ‘It’s awful but I never really look at them properly. Do you?’ – would become the basis of more than a few future Christie plots, among them
Death in the Clouds
,
After the Funeral
and
Appointment with Death
. The same chapter is called ‘The Red Signal’, also the title of a short story from
The Hound of Death
(see Chapter 3). Both this chapter and the short story share a common theme.

There are a dozen pages of notes in Notebook 65 for the novel, consisting mainly of a list of chapters and their possible content with no surprises or plot variations. But the other incarnation of
The Secret of Chimneys
makes for more interesting reading. Until recently this title was one of the few Christies not adapted for stage, screen or radio. Or so it was thought, until it emerged that the novel was actually, very early in her career, Christie’s first stage adaptation. The history of the play is, appropriately, mysterious. It was scheduled to appear at the Embassy Theatre in London in December 1931 but was replaced at the last moment by a play called
Mary Broome
, a twenty-year-old comedy by one Allan Monkhouse. The Embassy Theatre no longer exists and research has failed to discover a definitive reason for the last-minute cancellation and substitution. Almost a year before the proposed staging of
Chimneys
, Christie was writing from Ashfield in Torquay to her new husband, Max Mallowan, who was on an archaeological dig. Rather than clarifying the sequence of events, these letters make the cancellation of the play even more mystifying:

Tuesday [16 December 1930] Very exciting – I heard this morning an aged play of mine is going to be done at the Embassy Theatre for a fortnight with a chance of being given West End production by the Reandco [the production company]. Of course nothing may come of it but it’s exciting anyway. Shall have to go to town for a rehearsal or two end of November.

Dec. 23rd [1930] Chimneys is coming on here but nobody will say when. I fancy they want something in Act I altered and didn’t wish to do it themselves.

Dec. 31st [1930] If Chimneys is put on 23rd I shall stay for the first night. If it’s a week later I shan’t wait for it. I don’t want to miss Nineveh and I shall have seen rehearsals, I suppose.

A copy of the script was lodged with the Lord Chamberlain on 19 November 1931 and approved within the week, and rehearsals were under way. But it was discovered that, due possibly to an administrative oversight, the licence to produce the play had expired on 10 October 1931. Why it was not simply renewed in order to allow the play to proceed is not clear but it may have been due to financial considerations, because at the end of February 1932 the theatre closed, to reopen two months later under new management, the former company Reandco (Alec Rea and Co.) having sold its interest. But it must be admitted that this theory is speculative.

Whatever happened during the final preparations, Christie herself was clearly unaware of any problems and was as surprised and as puzzled as anyone at the outcome. The last two references to the play appear in letters written during her journey home, via the Orient Express, in late 1931 from visiting Max in Nineveh. The dating of the letters is tentative, for she was as slipshod about dating letters as she was about dating Notebooks.

[Mid November 1931] I am horribly disappointed. Just seen in the Times that Chimneys begins Dec. 1st so I shall just miss it. Really is disappointing

[Early December 1931] Am now at the Tokatlian [Hotel in Istanbul] and have looked at Times of Dec 7th. And ‘Mary Broome’ is at the Embassy!! So perhaps I shall see Chimneys after all? Or did it go off after a week?

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

It is not known when exactly or, indeed, why Christie decided to adapt this novel for the stage. The use of the word ‘aged’ in the first letter quoted above would seem to indicate that it was undertaken long before interest was shown in staging it. The adaptation was probably done during late 1927/early 1928; a surviving typescript is dated July 1928. This would tally with the notes for the play; they are contained in the Notebook that has very brief, cryptic notes for some of the stories in
The Thirteen Problems
, the first of which appeared in December 1927. Nor does
The Secret of Chimneys
lend itself easily, or, it must be said, convincingly, to adaptation. If Christie decided in the late 1920s to dramatise one of her titles, one possible reason for choosing
The Secret of Chimneys
may have been her reluctance to put Poirot on the stage
.
She dropped him from four adaptations in later years –
Murder on the Nile
,
Appointment with Death
,
The Hollow
and
Go Back for Murder
(
Five Little Pigs
). The only play thus far to feature him was the original script,
Black Coffee
, staged the year before the proposed presentation of
Chimneys
.
Yet, if she had wanted to adapt an earlier title, surely
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
or even
The Murder on the Links
would have been easier, set as they are largely in a single location and therefore requiring only one stage setting?