Blurb (US) Source: Facsimile Dust Jackets LLC Not till the very end of the book is the identity of the mysterious Seven o’clock revealed. Their investigation lead them into some queer places and more than once into considerable danger. Who put them there and had they any connection with the night club in Seven Dials? That is the mystery that Bill Eversleigh and Bundle and two other young people set out to investigate. When Gerald Wade died, apparently from an overdose of sleeping draught, seven clocks appeared on the mantelpiece. It isn’t at all – the clues of the chewed glove and the golf clubs should make it fairly obvious, but of course one never considers that possibility at all. Doubtless he will fail to realize that many of the sentences in the novel carry a double meaning, although he may (like various contemporary critics) feel that the solution is unfair. In many ways it is the Roger Ackroyd of the thriller, relying on the reader’s expectations about the conventions of the genre (the silly ass hero, the secret society, the master criminal and the foreign adventuress, all of which are stated to be fictional devices rather than found in real life several times in the novel) to lead him astray. While Chimneys is subtler, more sophisticated and more complex, this is one of Christie’s best early jobs of leading the reader astray. This is Agatha Christie penning a sequel to The Secret of Chimneys, and, like that book, Seven Dials is a high-spirited and thoroughly entertaining bit of nonsense.

When a popular author of the 1920s writes a book set at a large country house in summer, where the characters include an absent-minded aristocrat and his strong-minded daughter (with an ominously forceful sister), a pushy self-made millionaire, a secretary called “the efficient Rupert B –” and silly asses named “Pongo” and “Socks”, and the plot hinges on a misunderstood remark, one would immediately assume that the author was PG Wodehouse penning a sequel to Something Fresh.

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