Agatha Christie. The Man in the Brown Suit. 1924. The Agatha Christie Collection. Create Space, 2019.

———. The Secret of Chimneys. 1925. The Agatha Christie Collection. Create Space, 2019.

The Man in the Brown Suit starts off as a mystery but ends up, like The Secret Adversary, as more of an adventure or thriller. It is somewhat formulaic, but it is still fun to read. Because of its wide-ranging settings, it has a scope that many of the Christie tales do not have. Taking place in multiple hemispheres and countries, this is emphatically not a closed room mystery.

Anne Beddingfeld, daughter of a famous archaeologist, happens to observe the unusual death of a man in a London subway station. The man looks past Anne as though he sees something that shocks him, and falls onto the track where he is killed by the live rail. A man in the crowd identifies himself as a doctor, does some routine checks on him, declares that the man is dead, and runs away.

As the doctor runs off, he drops a note which Anne picks up. It says, “17.1.22 Kilmorden Castle” and has a note about an appointment for a showing of a house for rent. Anne has been recently orphaned and is looking for some adventure. She goes to the house showing only to discover that the body of an unidentified woman stabbed to death was found there shortly before she arrived. A witness says she saw a man with a brown coat leave the house around the time the murder occurred.

Anne’s curiosity is aroused, but she can find no record of any place named Kilmorden Castle. She happens to notice an advertisement for a ship named Kenilworth Castle and discovers that the line also has a ship named Kilmorden Castle. The ship is scheduled to leave England for South Africa on the 22nd. That perhaps explains the “22,” but what about the 17 and 1?

Anne thinks she might be able to sleuth out some information about the man in the brown suit and the two deaths she has encountered. She persuades the editor of a London daily to take her on for this investigation. Now she is gainfully employed. Her next step is to see about the Kilmorden Castle.

She books passage, and after a conflict about who is supposed to take Cabin 17, Anne is assigned the cabin. The next morning at 1 a.m. a stewardess knocks on the cabin door, and then a few minutes later a man whom Anne thinks she has seen before stumbles in with a stab wound under his arm.

It gets more complicated and Anne finds herself up to her neck in intrigue. Although she has little money, she does have some name recognition because of her father’s fame as an archaeologist. This helps at one point because she can tell in conversation who really knows something about archaeology and who does not.

The cruise ship and subsequent landing in South Africa have an interesting cast of characters. There is John Eardsley, son of the owner of the house where the woman was killed. His father was a millionaire who made his fortune in African mining (Cecil Rhodes anyone?). Like so many young men of the time, he is a veteran of World War I.

There is also the aristocratic Sir Eustace Pedlar who has a small entourage traveling with him. One of his secretaries named Pagett apparently tries to thrown Anne overboard one night on the ship.

Fortunately for Anne, the Honorable Suzanne Blair, a society dowager, takes Anne under her wing. Anne travels with her to the interior. The geography is a little vague, but it sounds like they are in Bechuanaland (now Botswana), then a British colony. Once again, Anne’s life is threatened. It seems people thinks she knows more than she really does.

She learns that Eardsley and a friend had found a source of diamonds in British Guiana (now Guyana), but they were defrauded when someone substituted diamonds recognizable as coming from South Africa for the one they found. They were accused of fraud even though they had been set up. Eardsley’s friend, Harry Rayburn, was later killed in the war.

Also traveling with them is Colonel Race. Rumors are that he belongs to the Secret Service, but he seems to be a friendly tourist. Colonel Race will later make an appearance in Death on the Nile.

There is more. Anne receives a note supposedly from an old friend of her father’s who is affiliated with a museum in Cape Town. She goes to visit him, but the address belongs to someone else and she is taken captive. Throughout the novel there are allusions to a popular film series The Perils of Pamela (cf. The Perils of Pauline?). At the beginning Anne envies Pamela’s adventures, though she is liberated enough to sense that Pamela did not always need to be saved by a handsome young man. As the story evolves, she is less happy about being in such an adventure but at the same time determined to figure out what is going on. She manages to get out of a series of scrapes—sometimes on her own, but sometimes with the assistance of others.

Not everyone is who they say they are. A few characters have several identities. One is a master of disguise. Behind all the intrigue appears to be some jewels—maybe from Guiana, maybe from Africa, maybe both—and an éminence grise known as the Colonel. Who is this Colonel? What is his game?

Meanwhile, as Anne finds herself in Johannesburg, there is a revolution going on. It is dangerous for anyone to be out and about. At another point, she finds herself on an island in a river in the middle of an African desert. This tale has scope. The mystery is eventually solved. There is a bit of romance. It is fun.

The Secret of Chimneys is another action mystery by Christie. The striking characteristic about this one is that there are attempts to frame some of the main characters. At its core, the story is about the succession of governments in the country of Herzoslovakia. Kind of like Zenda’s Ruritania, this is a small Balkan kingdom that is currently a republic. However, the republic is unstable and there is a move to reestablish the monarchy. The putative King Michael of Herzoslovakia has come to Britain both to look for political support and some financial backing. It seems that oil has been found there and potential investors from both the U.K. and U.S.A. are interested.

Meanwhile, in South Africa, a couple of young Englishmen who befriended a Herzoslovakian count have two manuscripts that others might be interested in. One contains the memoirs of the count. People are concerned that the memoirs may be a tell-all that makes Herzoslovakian royals and politicians look really bad. There are also some letters that someone has used to blackmail a woman named Mrs. Revel. These are apparently letters written by Mrs. Revel to a lover posted in Africa. One of the letters has the return address of Chimneys, a well-known mansion near London owned by the Marquis of Catherham.

It so happens that when Anthony Cade, one of the young men, arrives in England, a meeting is arranged by Foreign Secretary George Lomax for all the principals in the Herzoslovakia restoration scheme. Among them are King Michael, Mr. Lomax, potential investor Herman Isaacson, American investor Mr. Fish, Lomax’s secretary Bill Eversleigh, and Virginia Revel. Mrs. Revel is a 27-year-old widow whose late husband had been the Ambassador to Herzoslovakia. She is invited because of her familiarity with the country and her acquaintance with King Michael.

On Cade’s first night in a London hotel, a waiter breaks into his room to steal the manuscript. Cade is able to defend himself, but the waiter escapes with a bundle of papers—but they are the blackmail letters, not the manuscript. Needless to say, the waiter does not report to work the next day. Cade decides to track down the Mrs. Revel. He finds in the newspaper some information about Virginia Revel, and comes to her house. When he arrives, she has just discovered the body of a man she had never seen until the day before murdered in her house.

She says the man had approached her with the letters and asking for a thousand pounds from her or he would publish them. The man is none other than the waiter from the hotel. Mrs. Revel is to leave for Chimneys the next day. Cade helps her dispose of the body and the pistol that was found in the room. Mrs. Revel says she did not write those letters, it must have been another Revel. She also says that she owns no guns or pistols, but the pistol was engraved with the name Virginia. Clearly, this is a frame up, but why would someone go to all this trouble to frame her?

Cade develops a clever but slightly complicated way to dispose of the body and the pistol. The disposal of the pistol is a particularly clever send-up of detective stories. Weapons used in crimes are often buried or thrown in bodies of water. Here Cade climbs a tall tree and places it in the treetop. No one, he thinks, will think of looking up to find the weapon.

Cade that night goes to Chimneys. A note on the dead man says “Chimneys 11:45.” He has been told about the meeting to begin the next morning there. Mrs. Revel is already there. He sneaks onto the property and actually is looking through one of the windows when he hears a shot. A light in one of the upstairs windows goes on briefly, and then all is quiet. He runs off to the nearby inn where he is staying. The next morning, the maid discovers the body of King Michael. While this story has many assumed identities, Mrs. Revel is able to confirm that the victim is indeed King Michael.

The police are called in, so we meet the clever but suspicious Inspector Battle. Soon an investigator from the French Sûreté shows up, one Monsieur Lemoine.

There is something else going on as well. The Koh-i-Noor, the famous British royal jewel has been stolen and replaced with an imitation diamond. There are also some Herzoslovakian jewels that may have been stolen as well. The last royal couple to actually rule the country were killed in a coup. That King married a beautiful French actress. French authorities seem to think she may have been connected to a gang of notorious jewel thieves led by a man who goes by many names but best known as King Victor.

Now King Victor had been imprisoned in France for seven years. No one could ever connect him to a really big heist, so he was released a few months ago and is believed to have gone to England. French authorities tried to keep track of him, but he soon gave them the slip.

Two murders, two manuscripts, political and commercial plotting, a potential master criminal, at least one frame-up—this makes for a fascinating and entertaining story. No, there is no Poirot, but there is still enough humor mixed in the intrigue to say The Secret of Chimneys has a lot to recommend it.

Postscript. These two are the last two novels in the Agatha Christie Collection as noted above. The book also contains over two dozen short stories involving Poirot. Nearly all of them are told by Hastings. The short stories are uneven, but the best ones are clever. The reader cannot help think of Sherlock Holmes and Watson, but Poirot is a bit different. He is more conceited. In that sense he is reminiscent of the French sleuth Arsène Lupin. He or the narrator have more of a sense of humor than Holmes, Watson, or Lupin. Poirot, like Holmes, tends to ask the right questions. While Poirot notes things that people do more than the physical evidence, they point us to the solution. For example, in one case there is a murder after an evening dinner party. When Poirot arrives he notices that the curtain in the main window is not drawn. Why, he wonders, was the curtain not drawn? People outside can see what is going on inside once the sun goes down and lights go on. Yes, it it a physical clue of sorts, but it really asking a question about human behavior.

I should note that right now I have reviewed a number of mysteries. One more may be coming. Part of that is because of the Agatha Christie Collection I obtained. But part of the reason is that we have been proofreading a fascinating but intellectually challenging piece of nonfiction. Reading something a little lighter has been refreshing after a few hours of the heavier stuff.