Calling it Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials should have been an early warning. There are so many excellent adaptations of Christie novels, from David Suchet’s definitive Poirot and Joan Hickson’s Miss Marple, to the grim Sarah Phelps adaptations. On film, Kenneth Branagh has starred as Poirot in three glossy adaptations alongside earlier star-studded versions of Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and The Mirror Crack’d
So it was with some anticipation that one went into this adaptation of Christie’s 1929 novel, The Seven Dials Mystery, only to be sorely disappointed. The book, with its jolly young people, masked societies and international intrigue, has been described as PG Wodehouse writing a John Buchan spy thriller. Despite opening in 1920 in Ronda, with Lord Caterham (Iain Glen) gored to death by a bull, and then moving forward five years to a house party, the show is largely dun-coloured.
The Caterham family home, the gracious Chimneys, is rented out by Lady Caterham (Helena Bonham Carter) to the industrialist Sir Oswald Coote (Mark Lewis Jones). A house party is under way, with several guests from the Foreign Office, including Jimmy Thesiger (Edward Bluemel), Ronny Devereux (Nabhaan Rizwan) and Gerry Wade (Corey Mylchreest).
The daughter of the house, Lady Eileen “Bundle” (Mia McKenna-Bruce), circulates among the guests stopping to make plans with Gerry, who is her special young man. Dr Cyril Matip (Nyasha Hatendi), who has invented a revolutionary material, is part of the house party.
As a prank on the perpetually late-rising Gerry, his friends place eight alarm clocks around his room. When he is found dead, with one clock missing, Bundle leaps into the fray, determined to solve the mystery. There is mention of the seedy locality of Seven Dials, another death, a grieving sibling, a glove marked with teeth marks, a secret society and missing plans.
Stolidly overseeing all the comings and goings is Superintendent Battle (Martin Freeman). Some of the elements of the book are kept including Socks (Ella Bruccoleri) and her fascination for the word “subtle” and brainy Pongo (Tim Preston), but the solution and climax has been rewritten, and not for the better.
The lightness of Christie’s adventure-adjacent books is woefully missing. The actors do what they can with the material, but do not seem very convinced of their characters. The ever-reliable Bonham Carter turns in a vanilla performance while Freeman looks like the only one who had fun.
Bundle, who might have been envisioned as a Lady Mary Crawley type, is not particularly feisty and is unable to convincingly sell her determination to uncover the truth behind Gerry’s murder.
Rather than plod through this mini-series, one would be better served watching a classic Poirot or Marple mystery, or even the adaptation of 1925’s The Secret of the Chimneys, which introduces both Bundle and Battle.
Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials is currently streaming on Netflix
