Superintendent Battle is a fictional character] created by Agatha Christie. He appears as a detective in the following novels:
- The Secret of Chimneys (1925)
- The Seven Dials Mystery (1929 - including some of the same characters, notably Lady Eileen "Bundle" Brent)
- Cards on the Table (1936, with Hercule Poirot, Ariadne Oliver and Colonel Race)
- Murder is Easy (1939)
- Towards Zero (1944)
Battle is notable for his stolid good sense, and he relies in part on the appearance of being a stupid or unimaginative police officer as a means to investigating his cases.
He is often described as being a classic "carved from oak" yeoman Englishman, with the stolidity, bravery and good sense of the breed.
When on county cases he seemed most often to report to Colonel Melrose.
Until Towards Zero the reader knows nothing of his domestic arrangements, but in this novel we learn that he has a wife and five children, the youngest of whom ( Sylvia) unwittingly provides a key clue to the mystery. In the Hercule Poirot novel The Clocks, the pseudonymous secret agent Colin Lamb is heavily implied to be the son of the now-retired Battle.
Battle also has a secret professional life that is revealed in the denouement to The Seven Dials Mystery, in that he is the leader of a changing roster of six amateur sleuths who meet in secret in a secret headquarters and wear rather fantastic clock-faced costumes. Battle himself was the mysterious "Number Seven". This is never referred to again. He is in many respects typical of Christie's police officers, being (like Inspector Japp), more careful and intelligent than the police officers of early detective fiction, who had served only as foils for the brilliance of the amateur sleuth.