The Seven Dials Mystery - Agatha Christie [0]
The Seven Dials Mystery
Contents
Introduction
1 On Early Rising
2 Concerning Alarum Clocks
3 The Joke that Failed
4 A Letter
5 The Man in the Road
6 Seven Dials Again
7 Bundle Pays a Call
8 Visitors for Jimmy
9 Plans
10 Bundle Visits Scotland Yard
11 Dinner with Bill
12 Inquiries at Chimneys
13 The Seven Dials Club
14 The Meeting of the Seven Dials
15 The Inquest
16 The House Party at the Abbey
17 After Dinner
18 Jimmy’s Adventures
19 Bundle’s Adventures
20 Loraine’s Adventures
21 The Recovery of the Formula
22 The Countess Radzky’s Story
23 Superintendent Battle in Charge
24 Bundle Wonders
25 Jimmy Lays his Plans
26 Mainly about Golf
27 Nocturnal Adventure
28 Suspicions
29 Singular Behaviour of George Lomax
30 An Urgent Summons
31 The Seven Dials
32 Bundle is Dumbfounded
33 Battle Explains
34 Lord Caterham Approves
About the Author
Other Books by Agatha Christie
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
by Val McDermid
Things that everybody knows about Agatha Christie: she produced a lot of books that still outsell the competition; she was the greatest plotter of the classic detective story; she did a vanishing act and turned up amnesiac in Harrogate, identified by the banjo player in the hotel band; she wrote the longest-running play in theatrical history, The Mousetrap; and she couldn’t write thrillers.
So why am I suggesting that anyone would want to read The Seven Dials Mystery? After all, it has all the ingredients of the classic 1920s thriller, as exemplified by; A. E. W. Mason, Sapper and John Buchan. Secret plans, evil foreigners, marvellous cars with running boards and powerful engines, the joint threats of Germany and Communist Russia, house parties, young men wandering round with loaded revolvers and plucky young women–they’re all there by the bucketload.
Oh, and let’s not forget the secret society that meets behind closed doors, whose members are masked so not even they know who the other members are. Bulldog Drummond and Richard Hannay territory, surely? Which we know that Christie can’t do. Right?
Wrong. Because The Seven Dials Mystery isn’t a thriller. It’s a pastiche of a thriller, an antidote to the gung-ho chest-beating of the boys. It’s wry, it’s got its tongue planted firmly in its cheek and it subverts the whole genre it appears to be part of, not least because as well as all of this, it also delivers cleverly dovetailed plotting with a typical Christie flourish at the end. ‘Ah yes,’ we sigh. ‘Fooled again.’ If one of our Young Turks did something similar with the thriller now, we’d all nod sagely and go, ‘how very post-modern, how very self-referential and knowing, how very metafictional.’
But that was then and this is now. So Christie gets no credit for poking her tongue out at the big boys who set the agenda for what a thriller should be. I mean, how can a nice middle-class wife and mother be considered a subversive? How embarrassing would that be for the leather-jacketed iconoclasts?
But the fact remains that The Seven Dials Mystery really doesn’t perform as expected.
As well as showing that when it came to sleight of hand, Agatha Christie just couldn’t help herself, what The Seven Dials Mystery reveals is the side of its author that everybody seems to forget. (Not surprisingly, when you look at those stern jacket photographs…) She had a sense of humour. It was sly and shrewd, and never far from the surface.
It’s there in the very first Jane Marple mystery in the character of Griselda, the hopelessly inappropriate wife of the very conservative vicar. And it continues in the Marple novels with, for example, a series of sly digs at Miss Marple’s nephew, the literary novelist Raymond West, whose pretensions are a constant source of bubble-bursting on Christie’s part.
And it’s there in the Poirot mysteries too. Perhaps Christie’s funniest as well as her most self-referential character appears regularly there–the crime writer Ariadne Oliver. Mrs Oliver, with her perpetually bursting bags of apples and her disregard