The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie * * *

I read The Seven Dials Mystery (1929) for my 2025 Agatha Christie Reading Challenge. At first, I confused it with The Clocks. Both involve clocks and a murder, but The Clocks is a Poirot story and this one isn’t. That initial confusion set the tone for me, as I went in expecting one thing and found myself in quite another.

This is Christie in her thriller phase. In the late 1920s, she liked to play with secret societies, masked meetings, and the idea that danger lurks just beyond the country-house gates. The novel also reuses the setting from The Secret of Chimneys and brings back a few characters, though I wasn’t familiar with them before. It gave me the feeling of being introduced to a group of old friends everyone else already knows.

The heroine here is “Bundle” Brent, young, sharp, and impulsive. When one of her friends turns up dead, she charges headlong into the mystery. What begins as the familiar comfort of a body in a grand house shifts into something stranger. There are hints of espionage, a secretive London club, and a lingering uncertainty about who the villain is, or even how many villains there might be.

Listening to it as an audiobook wasn’t easy. The cast is large and the voices blurred together, and more than once I lost track of who was who, especially as I listened in short bursts with days in between. The plot meanders as well. It doesn’t have the tight snap of Poirot or Miss Marple, and that added to the confusion.

But it isn’t without charm. There’s an adventurous energy to it, lighter than Christie’s usual mysteries, almost as if she’s testing the waters of a mystery-thriller hybrid. And because it isn’t one of her most famous works, it still feels fresh. It has surprises left in it for modern readers who have seen countless television adaptations. However, the book is getting a new Netflix adaptation in 2026, so we’ll see what they make of it.

I’d recommend The Seven Dials Mystery to anyone willing to step outside Christie’s main canon. It may not be her sharpest, but it shows her experimenting, and that glimpse of her stretching the form gives the book a life of its own. That sense of Christie trying something different is, in the end, what made the read worthwhile.