The Secret of Chimneys

As of 2018, Guinness World Records listed Agatha Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time. As of 2020, her novels had sold more than two billion copies in 44 languages. Half the sales are of English-language editions, and half are translations. According to Index Translationum, as of 2020, she was the most-translated individual author. The Secret of Chimneys was well received at first publication, described as more than a murder mystery, as it is a treasure hunt. Later reviews found it a first-class romp and one of the author's best early thrillers. The Times Literary Supplement reviewed the novel in its issue of 9 July 1925 and, after setting up the story, stated favorably that "there is ... a thick fog of mystery, cross-purposes and romance, which leads up to a most unexpected and highly satisfactory ending". The reviewer for The Observer wrote on 28 June 1925: "Mrs Christie plunges lightheartedly into a real welter of murders, innocently-implicated lookers-on, Balkan politics (of the lighter Ruritanian kind), impersonators, secret societies, ciphers, experts, secret hiding-places, detectives (real and pretended), and emerges triumphantly at the end, before her readers are too hopelessly befogged. Nobody is killed who matters much. The right people marry, after it all, having first endeared themselves to us by their frivolous attitude to the singularly animated doings around them." The reviewer concluded that Christie's "ingenuity and clear-headedness are really remarkable."