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Finished another Agatha Christie, this time The Secret of Chimneys, an early mystery/thriller from the mid-1920s.
A very convoluted storyline, with lots of mysterious strangers barging in to interfere with one's affairs and suspected hidden identities (of which I correctly guessed two) and attempted framing of people for crimes and searching for purloined items, much of it done in the titular English countryside manor.
Sometimes I wonder if authors in Central/Eastern European countries who get to see their regions expied as Ruritania (or in this case, Herzoslovakia) and used wholesale as unstable generically foreign nations which so thoughtfully provide lots of underhanded political intrigues for Englishmen to heroically sort out, ever invent fake areas of the British Isles in which to set thrillers where some fine upstanding Ruritanian subject gets dragged into the sordid squabbling caused by absolute primogeniture as those sneaky snobby aristocrats poison, strangle, and stab each other in order to inherit that precious Earldom and accompanying House of Lords seat from their oblivious bachelor uncles so they can begin repairing the decaying ancestral pile by taking bribes for their votes straightaway.
Anyway, this one was kind of part-Prisoner of Zenda, part WWI-prelude-influenced (what with the comrades of the "Red Hand" and the overthrow/assassinations of the ill-fated royalty of the book's faux-Balkan nation), and seemed to be trying to throw in the kitchen sink in terms of cramming a lot of sensational developments all into the same story.
That said, it was entertaining to see characters openly trying to work together to figure out what was really going on, and even making little tests to try and catch each other out. Mind you, I could have done without the casual use of ethnic slurs and the depiction of foreigners who are not of Anglo/Scottish heritage all being these funny-acting untrustworthy and occasionally barbaric chaps with stereotyped appearances and behaviour.
Also read the GN adaptation by François Rivière with art by Laurence Suhner. This time, the pacing of the story is done pretty much exactly right through the end, even if it did have to get condensed for the 48-page album length. Unfortunately, I didn't care for the facial designs of the art in this, which often made the putative hero of the story look like he had these especially sinister, evil plans he was just sitting on and waiting to unleash on the unsuspecting, especially right at the triumphant end. But the panel layouts were pretty cinematic.
Mild recommend if you're looking to try an early standalone Christie with a Ruritanian effect. Mystery/thriller bits are competently enough done, but the overall effect is not good enough to read on its own without that kind of curiosity value, IMHO, especially with the accompanying period prejudices enshrined in the novel.
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