Christie and Seven Dials: 2026 version and 1920s clothes

The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie

published  1929

 

 

This was one of the first Christies I read, and is still one of my favourites. I blogged on it back in 2016

Dress Down Sunday: 1929 book & ‘… a very transparent negligee…’

I’m coming it back to it after watching the new adaptation of it on Netflix: 3 x 1 hour episodes and highly enjoyable.

I have also recently looked at the Seven Dials area in John Dickson Carr and dragged Christie in:

The Fascination of Seven Dials: for Carr and Christie

The new series is not always faithful to the book, but the settings and costumes are lovely and Martin Freeman as Superintendent Battle is excellent. In the book Bundle’s mother is dead: in this series her father is dead and her mother is played by Helena Bonham Carter.

Bundle – Lady Eileen – is in almost every scene, so it stands or falls by the actor, and Mia McKenna-Bruce is wonderful. She is tiny, and looks very young, but did a great job.

My only complaint is a serious one: she spends too much time not wearing a hat and gloves, where in real life she would have always had these items when out of her home. In one scene she has just come from an inquest, and may have been a witness, and it is completely unthinkable that she would have attended a formal legal proceeding without a hat.

In the book – just proving my point – Bundle is at one point knocked out but says she thinks her hat saved her.

The rest of  her clothes were lovely though.

And now back to the book.

In a post on Agatha Christie short stories, I mention one which featured a butler called Tredwell. I said “This was obviously a name that struck Christie as particularly appropriate for the job, as the butler in The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery is also called Tredwell. And there is yet another butler of the same name in the play Black Coffee. (In case something is poking at your memory – this happened to me - the butler in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas is Tressilian, which is also the name of the posh aristo in Towards Zero, Lady Tressilian)”

One of the best features of the book is Bundle’s relationship with her father  - their dialogue over various meals is hilarious and it is also charming and heart-warming.

In the earlier post I drew attention to a number of ‘non-anachronisms’ in the book – those phrases that a modern writer could never get away with in a book set in the 1920s. And there is also a wonderful list of the secret societies supposedly operating in London - so I would modestly say, worth a look.

Bundle is forever changing her clothes – flimsy underwear & a black lace evening dress, while the mysterious countess is in black velvet:

 

black dresses from Vogue

The our heroine changes into breeches for adventuring. At one point she borrows her maid’s clothes, and luckily I found another a propos Punch cartoon (it was chicken farming last week):

But as ever Christie doesn’t really give you much description of the clothes.

Seven Dials is very much a ‘flapper adventure’ and thriller rather than a carefully plotted mystery, and there isn’t much in the way of clues and detection. There is one unusual aspect of it that cannot be discussed without serious spoilers, and it is cleverly done.

And - this book will, I think, always work its magic on me, and I will read it again every few years

The top photo of a woman in classic 1920s clothes (including her HAT) is from the Smithsonian, and shows – I could give you a  hundred guesses – the wife of one of the key participants in the Tennessee Scopes monkey trial, the famous evolution court case. She is called (another 100 guesses)  Ova Corvin ("Precious") Rappleyea.

The hat picture is from Sam Hood Australian National Maritime Museum 

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