The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha ChristieMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Unlike Poirot and Miss Marple, Superintendent Battle is one of those police detectives with minimal personality such as you'd find in a book by Freeman Wills Crofts, though despite his stolid manner and wooden, expressionless face, he does have a twinkle in his eye and an underlying intelligence which individualizes him.
This is a mystery based in international politics, and Battle is there to investigate the murder of an incognito prince who was about to become the restored monarch of "Herzoslovakia," a Balkan country, with the support of the British government and a consortium that wants to exploit its oil. Somewhere in the background is a notorious French/Irish criminal, a master of disguise, who's searching for a concealed jewel secreted in the house known as Chimneys some years earlier. The murder has occurred at Chimneys, and the place is crawling with VIPs, investigators, and their associates.
The cast includes a bombastic politician, known, because of his bulging eyes, as "Codders" to the disrespectful, which includes his rather dense and lazy secretary; the ineffectual nobleman who owns Chimneys and his bright and active daughter Bundle; the steel magnate who has rented Chimneys for a time, and his discontented wife; a beautiful young widow; and, centrally, a rough-and-tumble young man who has come over from South Africa to do a couple of Herzoslovakia-adjacent favours for a friend, taking that friend's name for the purpose, and becoming involved in the whole mess partly by coincidence. (view spoiler)
I didn't see the twist coming, and it's a good one. Battle is an effective investigator, and I enjoyed him, and the whole milieu, enough that I went almost straight on to the second in the series, which is even better.
I did give this one my "casual-racism" tag, partly because of the portrayal of the Jewish financier, and partly because of the free use of the word "Dago" early on and the reaction to the possibility, late in the book, that someone might have married an African woman. It very nearly got my "thin-romance" tag as well, since a big slice of the development of the main romance takes place offscreen, but it did at least have some development through the couple spending time together, so it dodges that tag in the end.
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment