The Fascination of Seven Dials: for Carr and Christie

First of all - comments and suggestions are still pouring in for the post on compass directions and writers

Compass directions, a children’s classic, and is North best?

 - keep them coming, and I will post again on the topic. 

But in the meantime, there is the excitement of a new Agatha Christie adaptation, coming to Netflix on 15th Jan. It's The Seven Dials Mystery, one of the first of her books that I read and still a great favourite. You can find a long- ago post here (though not nearly as long ago as my initial reading of SDM) though there may well be another once I have seen the new version. 

But in the meantime - here's an amuse-bouche, and backup for the historical view of Seven Dials and its past roughness. It is nowadays a very bougie part of Covent Garden

Patrick Butler for the Defence by John Dickson Carr

published 1956

 

The book begins with the death of a music-hall artiste, a magician. His widow Madam Cecile Feyoum is sorry about the death, but not heart-broken. She takes over his show and also takes over the middle of the book in a dramatic and very enjoyable femme fatale manner. She is appearing at a theatre in the aformentioned Seven Dials area and there is discussion of the changes over the years:

‘Seven Dials is a very small area between the top of Shaftesbury Avenue and the top of St Martin’s Lane. Seven  small streets come together, like wheel-spokes, into a tiny little square. On one corner is the Oxford Theatre…’

‘Isn’t it a dreadful kind of slum or something?’

‘Sixty or seventy years ago, madam, your information might have been correct and uptodate.. In mid-Victorian times it was the vilest of slums. Noted chiefly for poverty, fights, gin-shops, harlots and ballads.’ 

This may well remind you of Agatha Christie’s  words, written in 1929: 

Bundle sat frowning. Seven Dials. Where was that? Some rather slummy district of London, she fancied.

[This is confirmed by her friend Bill:] “Used to be a slummy sort of district round about Tottenham Court Road way. It’s all pulled down and cleaned up now.

[You wouldn't actually ever describe it as near the Tottenham Court Rd, in fact, given the many other names and roads you could pick to pin it down]

Not a million miles from Seven Dials is the famous Garrick Club, which has recently moved into the 20^th century by agreeing to admit women as members. I have visited there as a guest of the Detection Club. The eponymous Patrick Butler would seem to be a member, and is quoted thus:

‘Useful contacts begod!’, Patrick had once said, in the members’ enclosure of the Garrick Club. If a man can’t succeed by his own abilities alone, it’s poor weak success he deserves!’

I am going to take this as intended  irony. 

So. Patrick Butler. In 2024 I did a post on John Dickson Carr’s Below Suspicion, a 1950 book featuring a barrister of that name, as well as regular sleuth Dr Gideon Fell. Butler is a character who divides the fans – some people absolutely hate him. I think (someone will put me right if I’m wrong) that that was his first appearance, and here he comes again – this time flying solo.

He hooks up with a young solicitor, Hugh, and his fiancée (on/off) Helen: they are in trouble. Hugh has found a client murdered in his office, a room that was locked and unapproachable. He goes on the run with Butler in tow, and they all range around Central London, avoiding the police, investigating the case, and avoiding various organized crime villains. It is non-stop – the action takes place over about 24 hours.

Let's get this out of the way. Carr often has very 3-dimensional women characters, who have sex lives and their own morals. In this book, that IS demonstrated – but unfortunately, Butler’s attitude to women is awful, and involves actually smacking them, and seeming always on the verge of saying ‘they love it’ (all reminiscent of Anthony Berkeley’s problematic Wychford Poisoning). It can be said that a) Butler is meant to be awful and b) these attitudes wouldn’t have been seen as out of the ordinary at that time. It’s a real shame, because the relations between Pam and Helen, and Patrick and Hugh, are in some ways well-done and very interesting. Carr just needed to go to a consciousness-training class or two, or to have been born 50 years later.

'why would you put our picture in a post where women are not treated well?'

My friend JJ, over at The Invisible Event blog, has written an excellent post on the book, and this quote sums up the difficult aspects:

We’re very much in thriller territory here — and decidedly bawdy thriller territory, too, with women taking smacks and casual put-downs like it’s somehow pleasing to them — but while lacking Carr’s purest rigour (and social attitudes that come from the later half of the 20th century) there’s still much skill on display. 

The other point about the book is that I had absolutely no problem solving the crime – very very unusual with Carr. I kept thinking I must be wrong, there must be more to it, but no. I should say, I hadn’t worked out the exact way it was done (I thought I had, but I had underestimated the difficulties) but I was pretty sure of the rest.

But – well I still enjoyed it. It clearly follows on from Below Suspicion and in fact spoilers it in 2 or 3 different ways, one of them very overt.

I was taken by a female character being blasee and ennuyee – we don’t often see the feminine versions of the French adjectives.

An astrakhan collar is worn by the dead man: ‘the bloke’s theatrical overcoat with the astrakhan collar’. I've got a post upcoming featuring such coats, and their connection with the theatrical world, so we'll leave that for now.

I complained recently about the lack of females in Carr’s The Ten Teacups: no such complaint here, despite not always being happy by the way they are treated.

The splendid Madam Fayoum enters into the investigation and uses her magic tricks to confuse the police while wearing a post-performance red and gold robe, and nothing else.

 Later she turns up making a ‘brave show of leopardskin coat’.

So great clothes, theatrical setting, atmospheric London scenes - it has a lot to recommend it, with only a few attitude problems on the other side... 

The Red Kimono pictures are by George Hendrik Breitner from Wikimedia Commons

Magic poster from NYPL