The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie

‘Light-hearted’ thriller lacks detailed plot 

This 1929 novel is the second book Agatha Christie wrote following her divorce from her adulterous first husband, Colonel Archibald Christie, from whom she was separated in 1927. Looking back on this time in her life, she has commented: “I was gaining confidence over my writing and felt that I would have no difficulty in producing a book every year, and possibly a few short stories as well.”

She also said that she found "light-hearted, thriller type" novels easy to write as they didn't require too much plotting or planning. This is a very revealing comment and may resonate with some readers if they have found they don’t enjoy her thrillers as much as her detective stories.

I read The Seven Dials Mystery for the second time recently because I am working through Agatha Christie’s novels in chronological order to review them all for my blog.

Although I have found her Poirot novels keep getting better as I have been going along, I didn’t think The Seven Dials Mystery was as enjoyable as her previous thrillers, The Secret Adversary and The Man in the Brown Suit.

I found the dialogue at the opening of the book reminiscent of a Bertie Wooster novel by P G Wodehouse, when a group of young people are enjoying breakfast together at a country house party, and characters called Ronny, Pongo, and Socks, are coming up with a jolly idea for a joke to play on one of their fellow guests.

Agatha Christie can just about convince readers that the police are grateful for the help of Poirot or Miss Marple with their cases, but to believe that Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard is eager to enlist the help of Bundle, aka Lady Eileen Brent, for espionage work later in the book, is perhaps stretching credibility too far.

The novelist Val McDermid writes, In her introduction to the 2017 paperback edition of The Seven Dials Mystery, that Agatha Christie is deliberately subverting the thriller genre to poke fun at it. This may be true, or it could be that Agatha Christie was enjoying her new freedom following her divorce and felt like writing something fun and frothy rather than putting in the hard grind to produce one of her clever, tightly plotted, detective stories that would keep the reader guessing until the end.

The review in the Times Literary Supplement of 4 April 1929 was for once markedly unenthusiastic about a Christie book, saying: "It is a great pity that Mrs Christie should in this, as in a previous book, have deserted the methodical procedure of inquiry into a single and circumscribed crime, for the romance of universal conspiracy and international rogues.”

However, my slight disappointment with The Seven Dials Mystery, which was Agatha Christie’s ninth novel, won’t deter me from reading her other thrillers when I finally get to them.

I’m looking forward now to re-reading Number 10 on the chronological list, which is Murder at the Vicarage. This 1930 mystery novel introduces her amateur detective, Miss Marple, who is my favourite Agatha Christie detective character.

 

The Man in the Brown Suit

A fast-moving thriller that keeps the reader guessing until the end

The latest paperback edition of
The Man in the Brown Suit

Reading Agatha Christie’s novels again in order of publication is proving to be good fun because there is so much variety in the early stories as Agatha tries out new characters and different slants on the detective mystery format.

Agatha’s fourth novel, The Man in the Brown Suit, published in 1924, is very different from The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Murder on the Links, the first two Poirot novels and also nothing like The Secret Adversary, her first Tommy and Tuppence novel.

The novel has a pretty young heroine, Anne Beddingfield, who has long yearned for adventures, love and romance. When her professor father dies, leaving her alone in the world with a very small sum of money, she heads to London, where she witnesses the death of a man who falls from the platform at an underground station and is electrocuted on the rails.

The police decide it is an accidental death but Anne wonders about a man in a brown suit who she saw examine the body before running away. She has picked up a piece of paper that had been dropped nearby and armed with just one cryptic clue she vows to track down the man in the brown suit and achieve justice for the dead man. The message on the paper eventually leads to her boarding a ship bound for South Africa.

According to the official Agatha Christie website, the novel was partly inspired by a tour Agatha had made of the British Commonwealth with her first husband. Afterwards, Agatha wrote the story sitting in her Earl’s Court flat, finding inspiration for her descriptions of African landscapes by evoking her memories of them.

The Man in the Brown Suit is the first of her novels to feature an appearance by Secret Service agent Colonel Race, who assists Anne in her search for the truth. Colonel Race reappears in three later novels, Cards on the Table, Death on the Nile and Sparkling Cyanide.

Agatha Christie used her first payment from her
fourth novel to buy a Morris Cowley like this one

Towards the end of the story, Agatha describes Anne’s feelings as she falls in love very convincingly and in a complete departure from the style of her writing in her previous three novels.

However, she keeps the reader guessing  as to the identity of the villain right until the end of the book in true Agatha Christie style.

The Man in the Brown Suit is less a novel of detection and more of a fast-moving thriller that is typical of its period. It had mixed reviews when it was first published because some reviewers were disappointed that it was not a Poirot novel. This seems rather unfair. Surely, they would have realised that authors like to experiment?

It was not all bad news for Agatha though, as the £500 she received for the first publication of this story paid for her first car, a grey, bullnose Morris Cowley.

Even though the novel is nearly 100 years old, I would definitely recommend giving The Man in the Brown Suit a try. 

It is available from or

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