The Seven Dials Mystery. Agatha Christie
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Agatha Christie
The Seven Dials Mystery
Copyright
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1929
Copyright © 1929 Agatha Christie Ltd. All rights reserved.
Cover by www.juliejenkinsdesign.com © HarperCollins/Agatha Christie Ltd 2008
Agatha Christie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007122592
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2010 ISBN: 9780007422791
Version: 2020-08-06
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Contents
Copyright
Introduction
Chapter 1: On Early Rising
Chapter 2: Concerning Alarum Clocks
Chapter 3: The Joke that Failed
Chapter 4: A Letter
Chapter 5: The Man in the Road
Chapter 6: Seven Dials Again
Chapter 7: Bundle Pays a Call
Chapter 8: Visitors for Jimmy
Chapter 9: Plans
Chapter 10: Bundle Visits Scotland Yard
Chapter 11: Dinner with Bill
Chapter 12: Inquiries at Chimneys
Chapter 13: The Seven Dials Club
Chapter 14: The Meeting of the Seven Dials
Chapter 15: The Inquest
Chapter 16: The House Party at the Abbey
Chapter 17: After Dinner
Chapter 18: Jimmy’s Adventures
Chapter 19: Bundle’s Adventures
Chapter 20: Loraine’s Adventures
Chapter 21: The Recovery of the Formula
Chapter 22: The Countess Radzky’s Story
Chapter 23: Superintendent Battle in Charge
Chapter 24: Bundle Wonders
Chapter 25: Jimmy Lays his Plans
Chapter 26: Mainly about Golf
Chapter 27: Nocturnal Adventure
Chapter 28: Suspicions
Chapter 29: Singular Behaviour of George Lomax
Chapter 30: An Urgent Summons
Chapter 31: The Seven Dials
Chapter 32: Bundle is Dumbfounded
Chapter 33: Battle Explains
Chapter 34: Lord Caterham Approves
About the Author
Other Books by Agatha Christie
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