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      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

       Note to Readers

      Introduction

      Chapter 1: On Early Rising

      Chapter 2: Concerning Alarum Clocks

      Chapter 3: The Joke that Failed

      Chapter 4: A Letter

      Chapter 5: The Man in the Road

      Chapter 6: Seven Dials Again

      Chapter 7: Bundle Pays a Call

      Chapter 8: Visitors for Jimmy

      Chapter 9: Plans

      Chapter 10: Bundle Visits Scotland Yard

      Chapter 11: Dinner with Bill

      Chapter 12: Inquiries at Chimneys

      Chapter 13: The Seven Dials Club

      Chapter 14: The Meeting of the Seven Dials

      Chapter 15: The Inquest

      Chapter 16: The House Party at the Abbey

      Chapter 17: After Dinner

      Chapter 18: Jimmy’s Adventures

      Chapter 19: Bundle’s Adventures

      Chapter 20: Loraine’s Adventures

      Chapter 21: The Recovery of the Formula

      Chapter 22: The Countess Radzky’s Story

      Chapter 23: Superintendent Battle in Charge

      Chapter 24: Bundle Wonders

      Chapter 25: Jimmy Lays his Plans

      Chapter 26: Mainly about Golf

      Chapter 27: Nocturnal Adventure

      Chapter 28: Suspicions

      Chapter 29: Singular Behaviour of George Lomax

      Chapter 30: An Urgent Summons

      Chapter 31: The Seven Dials

      Chapter 32: Bundle is Dumbfounded

      Chapter 33: Battle Explains

      Chapter 34: Lord Caterham Approves

       Keep Reading

      About the Author

      Other Books by Agatha Christie

      About the Publisher

      Introduction

      by Val McDermid

      Things that everybody knows about Agatha Christie: she produced a lot of books that still outsell the competition; she was the greatest plotter of the classic detective story; she did a vanishing act and turned up amnesiac in Harrogate, identified by the banjo player in the hotel band; she wrote the longest-running play in theatrical history, The Mousetrap; and she couldn’t write thrillers.

      So why am I suggesting that anyone would want to read The Seven Dials Mystery? After all, it has all the ingredients of the classic 1920s thriller, as exemplified by; A. E. W. Mason, Sapper and John Buchan. Secret plans, evil foreigners, marvellous cars with running boards and powerful engines, the joint threats of Germany and Communist Russia, house parties, young men wandering round with loaded revolvers and plucky young women–they’re all there by the bucketload.

      Oh, and let’s not forget the secret society that meets behind closed doors, whose members are masked so not even they know who the other members are. Bulldog Drummond and Richard Hannay territory, surely? Which we know that Christie can’t do. Right?

      Wrong. Because The Seven Dials Mystery isn’t a thriller. It’s a pastiche of a thriller, an antidote to the gung-ho chest-beating of the boys. It’s wry, it’s got its tongue planted firmly in its cheek and it subverts the whole genre it appears to be part of, not least because as well as all of this, it also delivers cleverly dovetailed plotting with a typical Christie flourish at the end. ‘Ah yes,’ we sigh. ‘Fooled again.’ If one of our Young Turks did something similar with the thriller now, we’d all nod sagely and go, ‘how very post-modern, how very self-referential and knowing, how very metafictional.’

      But that was then and this is now. So Christie gets no credit for poking her tongue out at the big boys who set the agenda for what a thriller should be. I mean, how can a nice middle-class wife and mother be considered a subversive? How embarrassing would that be for the leather-jacketed iconoclasts?

      But the fact remains that The Seven Dials Mystery really doesn’t

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