Week of Books - The Seven Dials Mystery

 

The Seven Dials Mystery
Agatha Christie

"You'd have liked him, Father. I never saw anyone more cheerfully inefficient than he was."
"I don't like anyone who comes and dies in my house on purpose to annoy me," said Lord Caterham obstinately.

(Page 35)

Sometimes you just need a good murder mystery, as Aristotle would say, because we take pleasure in the image of a murder. Perhaps because it is so distant from our actual everyday experience - twists and turns, dangerous clues, intrigue. And if it's Agatha Christie, it's just a fun read overall.

This murder mystery had me chuckling quite a lot. It reads much like a P.G. Wodehouse novel, which always make me laugh. The set-up is a group of young people, who decide to play a joke on Gerry Wade, who tends to sleep in everyday until almost noon. They decide to buy eight alarm clocks to place in his room and set them all to wake him at 6:30 am. Except, the joke backfires. He doesn't wake up.

This starts the mystery of how he died. Accident? Murder? The more Bundle investigates this question, the more she somehow gets wrapped into a secret society, warning notes, another death, and her own inquisitive nature that puts her in danger.

I love how Agatha as the creator of this story leaves clues and breadcrumbs along the way, and when you get to the end when it is revealed, you look back and see how obvious it was if you had paid attention to those clues.

Maybe I was so distracted along the way, having a grand time with these characters and fun dialogue. 

"I haven't been to London," said Bundle, "I ran over a man."
"What?"
"Only I didn't really. He was shot."
"How could he have been?"
"I don't know how he could have been, but he was."
"But why did you shoot him?"
"I didn't shoot him."
"You shouldn't shoot people," said Lord Caterham in a tone of mild remonstrance. "You shouldn't really. I daresay some of them richly deserve it - but all the same it will lead to trouble."
"I tell you I didn't shoot him."
"Well, who did?"
"Nobody knows," said Bundle.
"Nonsense," said Lord Caterham. "A man can't be shot and run over without anyone having done it."
"He wasn't run over," said Bundle.
"I thought you said he was."
"I said I thought I had."
(Page 52)