So Christie gets no credit for poking her tongue out at the big boys who set the agenda for what a thriller should be. 'Fooled again.' If one of our Young Turks did something similar with the thriller now, we'd all nod sagely and go, 'how very postmodern, how very self-referential and knowing, how very metafictional.'īut that was then and this is now. 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. It's a pastiche of a thriller, an antidote to the gung-ho chest-beating of the boys. Because The Seven Dials Mystery isn't a thriller.

Bulldog Drummond and Richard Hannay territory, surely? Which we know that Christie can't do. 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. 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. 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. 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.

The 7 dials mystery