The Seven Dials Mystery - Agatha Christie [2]
Yet by the end of the novel, Christie has forced a reversal of almost all of these positions.
I’m not suggesting that she was actually a secret radical who was aiming to subvert the narrow-minded intolerance of her time and class. That would be patently absurd, for Agatha Christie was no revolutionary.
But she was far less of a hidebound conservative than is generally assumed. There is clearly more to The Seven Dials Mystery than a facile attempt to turn everything on its head in order to make the ‘least likely person’ hypothesis work. There is, I believe, clear evidence that Christie saw her world with a far clearer and colder eye than those who disparage her understand.
The Seven Dials Mystery is the perfect antidote to anyone who has overdosed on the classic English thriller from between the wars. But it’s also worth reading for the sheer skill with which Christie plays with her readers’ expectations and uses them to play the cleverest of narrative tricks with us.
It’s all sleight of hand. And the quickness of Christie’s hand still continues to deceive our eyes, all those years later.
Chapter 1
On Early Rising
That amiable youth, Jimmy Thesiger, came racing down the big staircase at Chimneys two steps at a time. So precipitate was his descent that he collided with Tredwell, the stately butler, just as the latter was crossing the hall bearing a fresh supply of hot coffee. Owing to the marvellous presence of mind and masterly agility of Tredwell, no casualty occurred.
‘Sorry,’ apologized Jimmy. ‘I say, Tredwell, am I the last down?’
‘No, sir. Mr Wade has not come down yet.’
‘Good,’ said Jimmy, and entered the breakfast room.
The room was empty save for his hostess, and her reproachful gaze gave Jimmy the same feeling of discomfort he always experienced on catching the eye of a defunct codfish exposed on a fisherman’s slab. Yet, hang it all, why should the woman look at him like that? To come down at a punctual nine-thirty when staying in a country house simply wasn’t done. To be sure, it was now a quarter past eleven which was, perhaps, the outside limit, but even then–
‘Afraid I’m a bit late, Lady Coote. What?’
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ said Lady Coote in a melancholy voice.
As a matter of fact, people being late for breakfast worried her very much. For the first ten years of her married life, Sir Oswald Coote (then plain Mr) had, to put it badly, raised hell if his morning meal were even a half-minute later than eight o’clock. Lady Coote had been disciplined to regard unpunctuality as a deadly sin of the most unpardonable nature. And habit dies hard. Also, she was an earnest woman, and she could not help asking herself what possible good these young people would ever do in the world without early rising. As Sir Oswald so often said, to reporters and others: ‘I attribute my success entirely to my habits of early rising, frugal living, and methodical habits.’
Lady Coote was a big, handsome woman in a tragic sort of fashion. She had large, mournful eyes and a deep voice. An artist looking for a model for ‘Rachel mourning for her children’ would have hailed Lady Coote with delight. She would have done well, too, in melodrama, staggering through the falling snow as the deeply wronged wife of the villain.
She looked as though she had some terrible secret sorrow in her life, and yet if the truth be told, Lady Coote had had no trouble in her life whatever, except the meteoric rise to prosperity of Sir Oswald. As a young girl she had been a jolly flamboyant creature, very much in love with Oswald Coote, the aspiring young man in the bicycle shop next to her father’s hardware store. They had lived very happily, first in a couple of rooms, and then in a tiny house, and then in a larger house, and then in successive houses of increasing magnitude, but always within a reasonable distance of ‘the Works’, until now Sir Oswald had reached such an eminence