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 for convention, is clearly a thinly disguised version of Christie herself.
Where Christie has her Belgian detective whom she came to dislike intensely, Mrs Oliver has a Finn. She is constantly to be heard complaining bitterly about her folly in creating a depressive detective from a country about which she knew nothing and has had to learn far too much. She moans that her publisher and her readers won’t let her kill him off because they like him too much. All of this is delivered in such a way that it’s impossible to avoid a wry smile at the character’s expense and at Christie’s too.
From the very first paragraph of The Seven Dials Mystery, we should be in no doubt that we’re in a world of Wodehousian insouciance. No one could have written such an opening, not even in 1929, without being conscious of its parodic quality.
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?’
Substitute Bertie Wooster for Jimmy Thesiger and Jeeves for Tredwell, and it wouldn’t feel at all out of place. I think it’s safe to say that Christie wasn’t setting up in competition with Buchan and Sapper when she wrote this novel.
When critics consider Christie now, they often point to the apparent intolerance and lack of political correctness revealed by her attitudes to class and to other races. It’s true that she patronises the lower classes and is extraordinarily offensive about Jews, Germans and Russians, among others. But in this she reflected the attitudes of a woman of her class and generation. It would have been remarkable if she had displayed different attitudes. Even a feminist icon like Virginia Woolf, writing at around the same time, displays an unnerving lack of insight into the lives and dreams of the ‘servant classes.’
But that hasn’t stopped people leaping on Christie as an example of all that is worst about the English. She’s accused of snobbery, of insensitivity, of racial and class stereotyping.
But how valid are these criticisms? For myself, I’ve always thought that the true test of people’s beliefs lies in their sense of humour. What they find funny will tell you far more about someone than their serious professions of belief. It’s often seemed to me that those we make the butts of our jokes are those for whom we nurse our deepest and most secret contempt.
So what does Christie make fun of in this novel?
Well, first there is the aristocracy. The egotistical, indolent and almost indigent Lord Caterham (a title absurd in itself, Caterham being the epitome of stifling Home Counties suburbia) is drawn with affection, but where Buchan or Sapper would have shown him as a figure of status, worthy of respect and trust, Christie shows him as a figure of fun who is indulged by his feisty daughter. He’s a not-too distant relative of Wodehouse’s Lord Emsworth.
Christie teases the nouveau riche just as wickedly. Sir Oswald and Lady Coote are perceptively lampooned, the one for his over-reaching ambition, the other for her failure to escape her lower middle-class sensibilities. We see her treated with disdain by the servants, while her husband fails to see how little acceptance his wealth, his title and his material success have brought him.
But the upper middle classes are given no more leeway than the arrivistes. The Seven Dials Mystery is peppered with ineffectual Oxbridge Foreign Office young men being rescued by their women. The men are silly asses, who avoid disaster more by luck and having the right people behind them than by finely honed judgement.
But most importantly, prejudice comes under the cosh. There are several characters in The Seven Dials Mystery about whom we are invited to make knee-jerk judgements, from the mysterious East European countess to the apparently reliable but unimaginative Scotland Yard detective. All of these snap decisions would fall into line with the received bigotry of the time.
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