"I never faint," said Bundle. "But you might as well get me a cocktail. I shall certainly need it. Then lock the door of the room again -- don't forget -- and take all the door keys back to their proper doors. And, Alfred -- don't be too much of a rabbit. Remember, if anything goes wrong, I'll see you through." - The Seven Dials Mystery, p. 109
The Sum of It All
The Seven Dials Mystery happily returns us to Chimneys, the great estate first visited in The Secret of Chimneys. Though we meet some new folks in this one, we also happily reunite with some of our pals from the last trip, including the feisty Bundle Brent, her father Lord Caterham, anxious and ambitious politician George Lomax (aka Codders because of his eyes, which are googly like a cod fish), and his Labrador-like assistant Bill Eversleigh.
Our story opens on a group of young peeps gathered for a country weekend at Chimneys, hosted by some wealthy older people who are renting the estate while Lord Caterham and Bundle are traveling on the Continent. Apparently back in the day it was totally normal for an old couple to invite a group of six young adults out to hang around in the country for a few days. One of the girls was named Socks (ohh British people). One of the fellas, a Gerry Wade, finds himself victim of a violent crime (well, other people find him, to be clear) the very same morning the rest of the group was hoping to awaken him with a practical joke involving eight alarm clocks. Gerry's friends, including Bundle, start wondering what's going on, and quickly find themselves in the mix with what appears to be a highly mysterious and international gang of mystery that wears masks that look like clock faces at their meetings, each of them referred to by the others only by their assigned hour of the day.
It is hard to summarize these books in such a way as to lead readers down the road without giving away the store! Agatha doesn't reveal the real bad guy in this one until the very, very end, and I was fairly certain it was a completely different person until that very page. Get it, Agatha! By the time she wrote this one, she was really hitting her stride, mystery-wise.
The YOA Treatment
Despite people (men) constantly fussing that she shouldn't be involved with solving the mysteries at hand on account of DANGER, Bundle takes it upon herself to get to the bottom of things. When trying to track the baddie, she puts on her riding pants and climbs down a trellis (after being told to stay safely ensconced in her room while the men handle things). When she can't figure out what the mysterious Seven Dials entails, she insists on hiding in their lair to figure it out straight from the source (despite a fella telling her she musn't risk it; she just asks for a gimlet [both cocktail and tool varieties]. When she wants to know what's going on, she goes straight to Scotland Yard and demands answers (and won't take no as a valid one). And all the while she manages to do it with witty reparte' and gets a couple fellas to fall in love with her while she's at it (immediately following proposal acceptance, Bundle tells her fiance: "Unless you pull yourself together and become sensible, I shall very likely change my mind." No time for nonsense, they had some bad guys to catch.)
As always, I totally enjoyed the sparkling dialogue, for which Agatha has a real gift. But I also enjoyed meeting yet another of the "girl adventuress" characters that Agatha also had a gift for creating. From her autobiography, we learned that as a child, Agatha regularly invented stories and characters with distinct personalities to pass the time and occupy her imagination. She kept those pals with her for years, and I think once she grew up the clever girls she imagined as a kid made their way into her stories in the form of leading ladies like the delightful Bundle Brent. And aren't we lucky!
- E.
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