"The Secret of Chimneys" and "The Seven Dials Mystery" were published (and explicitly set) four years apart. The intervening period was momentous for Agatha Christie herself. "The Secret of Chimneys", which concerned the future of the Herzoslovakian royal family and their jewels, was widely regarded as the best of her earlier novels, but marked the end of her association with the publisher Bodley Head. In 1926 she went missing for eleven days, ending up in an hotel in Harrogate, some two hundred miles from her home in Berkshire, and in 1928 she was divorced from her first husband.