The Seven Dials Mystery

This is definitely one of Christie’s bigger flops. While I’m not fond of her more adventure focused novels, Seven Dials had an interesting enough start in that it looked to be trying to split the difference between the intrigue and action of her adventure novels with the logic and firm construction of her murder mysteries. I liked it early on, but the further I went the more it became clear that a book being half-mystery isn’t half as good as a proper mystery.

Apart from the initial two chapters (and a section near the last quarter) Seven Dials pretty much ignores any mystery about the initial circumstances behind the book so it can dive into secret societies, conspiracies, and other miscellaneous elements common to Tommy & show more Tuppence or the direct predecessor to this book, The Secret of Chimneys. In effect, the murder happens, we get some light details about it, then its shoved off to the side until the very end where the truth gets unsatisfyingly revealed. If the mystery were at least good then I could excuse the forays into adventure but its too barebones and loose on details to make the solution feel like anything other than a cop-out.

The most important thing I’m left with after reading this is to no longer worry about giving Christie’s adventure novels a shot. Even when she tries to integrate mystery into them it doesn’t seem to turn out well and unless I get some glowing recommendation I’ll just stick with her classic style mysteries instead. Unless you’re already a fan of the other Christie adventure novels I don’t see any reason to pick this one up. show less

An excellent mystery. It starts out somewhat ominously -- a practical joke designed to wake up champion sleeper Gerry Wade ends in tragedy when he turns up dead the next day, seemingly of an overdose of a sleeping draught. But then there are rumblings of a secret society known as the Seven Dials. What is their game, and what will they do to people who try to cross their path? Bundle Brent from The Secret of Chimneys does some investigative work, and she is truly a resourceful heroine. She is very much a type with Agatha Christie -- the plucky young upper-class investigator who is not afraid to get her hands dirty. The young men she associates with seem to have walked straight out of Wodehouse, and Lord Caterham (Bundle's father) is show more quite an adorable chap. The scene between him and George Lomax somewhat near the end of the book nearly had me laughing out loud on the bus.

As for the mystery itself, it really kept me guessing. Definitely did NOT see the ending coming. Very well done, Agatha. This one is worth reading, and then re-reading, just to savour the thrills. show less

Expect no Hercule Poirot, no Miss Jane Marple, no Tommy nor Tuppence Beresford; however, Superintendent Battle does just fine in The Seven Dials. The mountainous but subtly clever policeman manages to solve two murders and break an international ring of crooks in a cozy that will engage you to the very last page.

The caper begins with the death of a guest at — this is Dame Agatha Christie, after all — a house party. The deceased’s half-sister, the deceased’s friend, and another young woman, Lady Eileen Brent — Bundle Brent to her friends, who featured in Battle’s first novel, The Secret of Chimneys — launch an investigation. In due course, the trio stumble onto a conspiracy to commit a crime with international show more repercussions.

Christie crafted a four-star cozy up until the ending, which was so surprising and suspenseful that it bumped my rating up to a five. Superintendent Battle may not be a household name like Poirot and Miss Marple, but, as I said, he does all right in The Seven Dials. show less

"The clocks were wrapped up and paid for. Mr Murgatroyd watched the cars drive away with a puzzled air. Very spirited the young people of the upper classes nowadays, very spirited indeed, but not at all easy to understand. He turned with relief to attend to the vicar’s wife, who wanted a new kind of dripless teapot."

There is a lot to like about The Seven Dials Mystery. The spirited young people, the charming older generation, the country house setting - complete with a despotic gardener, London nightlife, and of course a murder which could not have possibly been committed.

A fun read with a twist.

How does she do it? Or I guess, how did she do it - either way, Agatha Christie created some of the best characters ever, and that often includes the minor characters. Lord Caterham has hardly any part to play in The Seven Dials Mystery, but he steals the show every time he speaks. His daughter, Lady Eileen aka Bundle, is another treat, though of course she's not a side character in this one - all the better.

Superintendent Battle himself is a minor character in his own series, much like Miss Marple, but even more so. He's far less compelling than either Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot, certainly less interesting than Tommy and Tuppence, but the rest of the cast makes up for it.

I enjoyed this one a great deal more than I did the first in show more the series, [b:The Secret of Chimneys|16361|The Secret of Chimneys (Superintendent Battle, #1)|Agatha Christie|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1295680018l/16361._SY75_.jpg|1223872]. And I understand that the next one features not only Superintendent Battle but also Poirot (it's actually Poirot #18) AND Colonel Race AND Ariadne Oliver. I can only hope that Lord Caterham makes at least a cameo appearance. show less

It's not a good thing when the first words I think of at the end of a novel are: 'Oh dear!' followed by 'And it was going quite well'.

In current memes this becomes:

HOW IT STARTED



HOW IT FINISHED



I enjoyed most of the book and liked some of the characters but, in the last fifteen per cent, the plot took a wrong turn, the exposition lost its lustre and some of the characters seemed to have undergone personality transplants.

Reading through Agatha Christie's books in order is an easy way to disprove the notion that writers get better with every book. In 1925, Agatha Christie published 'The Secret Of Chimneys', the book that first introduced us to some of the main characters in 'The Seven Dials Mystery'. It's one of the few Christie books that show more I'd recommend skipping. Yet her next book was one of her best, 'The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd'. The same seems to have happened with 'The Seven Dials Mystery', published in 1929. It's an improvement on 'The Secret Of Chimneys' but it's far from a great book. Yet the next book that Christie published was 'The Murder At The Vicarage' the first Miss Marple book and one of my personal favourites

When I started reading 'The Seven Dials Mystery'. I was pleasantly surprised at its lightness of tone. We were at Chimneys again but with a mostly fresh cast of characters, an industrialist and his wife were renting the place and were playing host to young men who seemed to have come straight out of a Bertie Wooster novel. The young men, who included Bill Eversleigh from 'The Secret of Chimneys' were mostly from the Foreign Office where they 'were employed in a purely decorative capacity' and happily described themselves and each other as 'silly asses'.

Of course, in Bertie Wooster novels, people don't get murdered at Blandings. At Chimneys, someone is bumped off fairly early on and nobody knows why or by whom.

Then we see the re-emergence of some of the characters from 'The Secret Of Chimneys' and I wondered if things would take a dive. Thankfully, they didn't. Bundle, (Lady Eileen Brent) has grown up a bit in the four years since 'The Secret Of Chimneys' and I liked her rather better this time around. I was amused at her assumption that nothing bad could happen to 'a girl of her class'. Her use of her privilege was entirely reflexive and so easier to forgive than deliberate acts of snobbery would have been. Her father, Lord Caterham, is unchanged from the last book but gets more exposure this time. He is an essay on how to live a life focused on avoiding upset.

By the middle of the book, a pattern had been set that integrated Bundle and the decorative young asses into an informal group investigating the death of their friend. In the course of their investigations, they encounter a secret society called 'The Seven Dials' and we enter 'The Man Who Was Thursday' territory in an extravagant way.

As I read on, I mentally retitled the book, 'Bundle Pulls It Off'. I had fun watching the irrepressible Bundle pursue her prey more hampered than helped by young men who could be members of The Drones Club, as they tilted with enthusiastic ignorance at 1920's versions of Bond villains. It was absurd but Christie clearly knew that and I think she did it well. ,

Inspector Battle was his solid, imperturbable self. He at least seemed to know what was going on and his presence anchored the increasingly implausible plot.

I think the rot started after a very well put together scene between Lord Caterham and the ever-pompous George Lomax who had unknowingly cast himself as Mr Collins from 'Pride and Prejudice' and whom Caterham was trying, rather ineffectually, to protect from his own foolishness. The book took a sudden leap into quite under-written romance after that that transformed Bundle into someone who was quite hard to recognise.

What really made the soufflé fall flat were the final scenes which, instead of being a version of 'Bundle saves the day with daring do' became 'Bundle sits and listens while everything is explained to her by a man who seems to have become someone much more bizarre than we thought he was'. The explanation might have worked because, although it was highly implausible it was quite ingenious, but the flat, static mode of exposition leached away any cleverness and left me feeling that whole thing was a dreary anticlimax.

The ending was so bad and so unexpected that I was left wondering if Christie was being, to borrow the favourite word of one of the characters, subtle and was quietly laughing at her earlier thrillers like 'The Man In The Brown Suit'. which has some plot elements in common.

I listened to the audiobook version of 'The Seven Dials Mystery', narrated by Emilia Fox, whose narration was one of the reasons that I enjoyed most of this book. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.


https://soundcloud.com/harpercollinspublishers/the-seven-dials-mystery-by show less

One of Agatha Christie's funniest books. Great, foppish aristocrats, boring pretentious politicians, and a heroine who isn't like them at all. It really is satire on British upper class society of the period.

This is the sequel, more or less, to The Secret of Chimneys, which is another satire on the British upper class, but you don't need to read that first to understand this. (In fact, I read this one first, and liked it so much I found the other one. I liked it a lot too.)

This is a lot more like her Tommy & Tuppence novels (e.g., Partners in Crime, which is a send-up of all the classical detective fiction, Christie included), rather than her Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple novels. It's more action-adventure than strict thinking. But, show more like almost everything she wrote, it does have a surprise ending.

I've come to the conclusion that Agatha Christie is much better when she writes about somebody other than Hercule Poirot. She practically says so, herself, in some of her novels, through the mouthpiece of one of her other minor characters, Ariadne Oliver, the detective novelist, who is always wondering why she created that horrible boring character. This novel has some of the freshest and funniest characters she created. show less