The Secret of Chimneys

The Secret of Chimneys is not the Christie you read when you want to see the Queen of Crime at the absolute peak of her powers. It was published in 1925, relatively early in her career, before she had fully settled into the precise psychological machinery of her best work, and it shows in ways that are simultaneously its greatest flaw and its most distinctive charm. This is Christie in adventure mode rather than pure mystery mode, and the difference in texture is significant.
The first thing to understand about this book is that it is genuinely funny. Christie's wit is usually deployed with great subtlety, embedded in dialogue and observation, but here it is much more overt. Anthony Cade is written with an almost P.G. Wodehouse lightness, a young man of irrepressible good humor who treats every new catastrophe as an interesting development rather than a genuine problem. His narration of events has a breezy, self-amused quality that is quite unlike anything else Christie wrote, and it makes the book enormously enjoyable to read even when the plot underneath is wobbling. Christie was clearly having fun writing Anthony, and that fun is contagious.
The plot itself is, by the standards of her later work, magnificently ridiculous. There are political assassinations, a disputed royal succession, a legendary jewel thief operating under multiple identities, a missing diamond hidden in ways that defy probability, and a cast of characters who arrive and depart and reappear in unexpected configurations with a cheerful disregard for plausibility. Christie expert John Curran described it as an enjoyable but preposterous romp littered with loose ends, and that is both accurate and beside the point, because the looseness and the preposterousness are inseparable from the book's particular pleasure. It moves at a pace that simply does not allow you to sit still long enough to notice the logical gaps.
Chimneys itself, the great country house of the title, is one of Christie's best settings. It has the quality of a house with genuine history and personality, full of concealed passages and inherited secrets and rooms that seem to lead somewhere unexpected. Christie uses it as both a physical location and a kind of structural metaphor, a place where surfaces conceal interiors, where the official version of events and the actual version of events are two different things occupying the same space.
Superintendent Battle appears here for the first time, and he is an interesting creation precisely because he seems, on every initial reading, so unimpressive. He is large, solid, patient, and utterly without flair. He does not have Poirot's wit or his theatrical quality. He makes no speeches about the little grey cells. He simply watches, and waits, and listens, and arrives at the truth through a process that is entirely unhurried and entirely invisible until it is complete. Christie would use him again in The Seven Dials Mystery and several other novels, and he rewards the patience the reader has to invest in him.
The love story woven through the adventure is pleasant without being particularly deep, and the romantic resolution is signaled early enough that it does not really function as a surprise. This is the book's biggest concession to the thriller genre rather than the mystery genre, and in the hands of a less accomplished writer it would feel mechanical. Christie makes it work through sheer likeability of character, even if the emotion underneath it is not especially convincing.
What The Secret of Chimneys lacks, compared to Christie's mature work, is the precision. The clues are not planted with the surgical control of, say, After the Funeral or Evil Under the Sun. Several plot threads are resolved in ways that are more expedient than satisfying, and the central revelation about the identity of the mysterious jewel thief King Victor, while clever, requires a fairly significant suspension of disbelief to accept. Christie herself knew this and acknowledged it indirectly by never attempting quite this kind of sprawling, breathless adventure again. Her later books are considerably tighter and considerably darker in tone.
But tight and dark are not the only qualities worth having in a novel, and The Secret of Chimneys has something that many of her more accomplished books do not, which is a kind of uninhibited enjoyment of its own ridiculousness. Read it in the spirit it was clearly written, as a romp, and it is enormously good fun.