One of the lesser known Christie’s characters is perhaps Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard, who was featured in five books. Bundle Brent and the country estate “Chimneys” are featured in books one and two. Battle joins forces with Hercule Poirot, Ariadne Oliver, and Col. Race in book three. In the Poirot novel The Clocks, secret agent Colin Lamb is implied to be the son of the now-retired Battle. The five books, in chronological order, are: The Secret of Chimneys (1925); The Seven Dials Mystery (1929); Cards on the Table (1936); Murder is Easy apa Easy To Kill (1939); and Towards Zero (1944). As I read somewhere else ‘to be accurate, Superintendent Battle is not so much a main character as he is a unifying element in this series of books.’
Superintendent Battle’s impassive expression misleads many new acquaintances into underestimating the determined lawman – but it is not nothing that one of Scotland Yard’s finest detectives is assigned the most volatile and mysterious cases of murder.
In his first adventure, The Secret of Chimneys, the Superintendent is concerned with a missing packet of letters – and their vital connection to murder and control of the throne of Herzoslovakia.
In The Seven Dials Mystery Battle returns to Chimneys, the sprawling country house with a dark secret, to investigate the existence of a secret organisation and the numerous deaths linked to it.
Cards on the Table is considered the best of Christie’s ‘closed-door’ murders and centres on an evening of Bridge with four successful murderers and four crime experts. It’s up to the Superintendent and Hercule Poirot to discover who exactly killed the host – and why.
The quiet, English, rural village depicted in Murder is Easy is shocked by a series of brutal murders – and Superintendent Battle will need all his cunning and intuition to see though the village’s idyllic façade – and stop the guilty party before they can strike again.
Finally, Towards Zero sees Battle attempting to identify a psychopathic killer who has murdered an old woman without any apparent motive. (Source: Amazon)
So far I’ve enjoyed very much all the books in this series I’ve read and I’m looking forward to reading The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery. Stay tuned.
A Crime is Afoot 