1929: The Seven Dials Mystery

Publisher: William Collins & Sons, 1929 (UK);  Dodd, Mead & Co, 1929 (US)

Series: Superintendent Battle

Category: Novel

Cross refs: The Secret of Chimneys; Parker Pyne Investigates

Warning, spoilers!

In The Seven Dials Mystery we see a reappearance of Lady Eileen Brent (Bundle) from The Secret of Chimneys, along with her father, Lord Caterham, the hapless Bill Eversleigh, George Lomax (or ‘Codders’, on account of his fish-like googly eyes) and, of course, Superintendent Battle. The scene is set four years on from Chimneys, and here Bundle and Bill take on more of a leading role, with Bill being presented as a passable love interest.

The Seven Dials Mystery is one of Christie’s thrillers, and, as such, it faced the (perhaps expected) backlash from contemporary reviewers who were clamouring for another Roger Ackroyd-style novel. Christie herself described Seven Dials as one of her ‘light-hearted thriller types … easy to write [and] not requiring too much plotting or planning’ – and perhaps, as far as the critics were concerned, this shows.[1]

Subsequent reviewers were kinder, however, enjoying the book for its representation of a time steeped in class hierarchies, for its whiff of Woodhouse and for its plucky heroine. I find myself among the latter group. I like Seven Dials. I like it not necessarily for its plot (which I don’t dislike), but predominantly for Christie’s witty writing and her biting reflection of the British class system, including her scathing critique of the Foreign Office, which she presents as a boys’ club of ‘purely ornamental’, upper-class chaps.

Indeed, as with The Mystery of the Blue Train, the theme of class is palpable throughout The Seven Dials Mystery. On a domestic level this is expressed in the contrast between the aristocratic Lord Caterham and the self-made Sir Oswald Coote. Through the voice of Lord Caterham, Christie conjures the perfect picture of Sir Oswald:

One of those large men … Powerful … What they call a forceful personality. The kind of a man you’d get if a steam-roller were turned into a human being … Frightfully tiring, full of all the most depressing virtues like sobriety and punctuality.

Yet, Caterham is not unaware of the failings of his own class, which he describes as ‘the cheerful inefficient’. And indeed, it is clear that, in the late 1920s, cheerful inefficiency was no longer enough to maintain the position of the landed classes. The fact that Lord Caterham has had to lease out his family home to the wealthy Sir Oswald is indicative of the declining position of the aristocracy and the rise of a new, industrial middle class as the 1920s turned into the 1930s.   

Christie’s attitude to such social climbing is clearly mixed. In the melancholic Lady Coote, she presents a tragic heroine, forced into a social standing for which she is not designed. This ‘handsome woman’ with ‘large, dark, mournful eyes’ is finding life at the top a lonely place to be:

The principal relaxation of her early married life had been talking to ‘the girl’ … Now, with a pack of housemaids, a butler like an archbishop, several footmen of imposing proportions, a bevy of scuttling kitchen and scullery maids, a terrifying foreign chef with a ‘temperament’ and a housekeeper of immense proportions … Lady Coote was as one marooned on a desert island.

There is something in the description of Lady Coote that brings to mind Christie’s short story, ‘The Case of the Rich Woman’, first published in 1932, and again as part of Parker Pyne Investigates in 1934. Though the names are different, both the protagonist of ‘The Case of the Rich Woman’ and Lady Coote share a sense of despondent dissatisfaction with their wealthy lives, which are the result of vast fortunes amassed by their husbands. Both long for a simpler time when they had enough, but not too much. In the introduction to Parker Pyne Investigates, Christie noted that the inspiration for the character of the short story was a woman she had encountered ten years prior, who had declared:

I’d like to know what I can do with all the money I’ve got. I’m too seasick for a yacht – I’ve got a couple of cars and three fur coats – and too much rich food fair turns my stomach.[2]

I wonder if, on some level, this woman also inspired something of the dissatisfaction expressed by Lady Coote.     

The interactions between Lady Coote and MacDonald, the despotic gardener, and those between Bundle and that self-same gardener, notably addressing the same issues but with a markedly contrasting approach, also demonstrate Christie’s perception that the correct handling of servants remained the preserve of the aristocratic classes.

From the domestic to the political, Christie’s depiction of the Foreign Office and its staff again pulls on perceptions of class favouritism and cheerful inefficiency. The men central to the novel are presented as a cluster of pleasant but seemingly hapless chaps, three of whom work in the Foreign Office: Gerry Wade, a ‘vacuous young man’ not ‘overburdened in an intellectual capacity’; the ‘amiable idiot’ Bill Eversleigh; and Ronny Devereux, who was ‘employed in a purely ornamental capacity’.

In 1929, the same year that Seven Dials was published, a Fabian Tract ‘publicly castigated the Foreign Office for failing to broaden its recruitment beyond aristocratic sources’.[3] Indeed, throughout its history, the British Foreign Office has faced accusations of class bias,[4] and has found itself ‘engaged in some scheme or other to try to challenge the allegedly upper-class profile of its recruits’.[5]

The ‘upper-class diplomat’ – the ‘jolly good chaps’ of Christie’s novel – was as much a cliché in the 1920s as it is now. There was an awareness, in the interwar years, that positions in the Foreign Office could be ‘bought’ in some way or other; whether through cultural or social capital, an expensive education, or tutoring designed to ‘play’ the recruitment/examination system. The 1929 Tomlin Commission, for example, ‘criticised the interview process, pointing out that wealthy students with privileged educational backgrounds were disproportionately successful’.[6]

The middle classes were already using the public schools as a means of entering the governing classes … The domination of Eton … seems to have increased … in the early twentieth century. Between 1908 and 1914, 9 out of 16 clerks and 16 out of 21 attachés came from this one school. However lazy or industrious such prospective recruits may have been, they, like their political heads, had gone through an educational system geared to moulding a particular kind of man.[7]

The Foreign Office official was cut from a template that defined how he looked, sounded and behaved. The Ronny Devereuxs and Gerry Wades of Christie’s novel fit this template. That Gerry turns out to be ‘something quite different’, and, ‘not quite such an ass as he made himself out to be’, is perhaps an acknowledgement that, amid the frippery of the Foreign Office, there were some solid, even heroic Secret Service men. And it is to one of these that we shall turn in the next novel.

[1] Christie 2011, p. 413.

[2] Agatha Chrsitie, Parker Pyne Investigates (London, 2017), p. v. 

[3] Robert Nightingale, Fabian Tract No. 232: The Personnel of the British Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service, 1851–1929 (1929) cited in James Southern, ‘A Class of its Own? Social Class and the Foreign Office, 1782–2020’, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, n.d., p. 7.

[4] Peter Hennessy, Whitehall (London, 2001), p. 400.

[5] Southern, ‘A Class of its Own?’, p. 7.

[6] Southern, ‘A Class of its Own?’, p. 21.

[7] Zara Steiner, ‘Elitism and Foreign Policy: The Foreign Office Before the Great War’, in Brian McKercher and David Moss (eds), Shadow and Substance in British Foreign Policy, 1895–1939, (1984), p. 21.