The Seven Dials Mystery

For me, April of this year had become the month for reading dystopian novels, while May was the month for mostly Anthony Trollope, with bits of Agatha Christie thrown in at the end.

With my having just finished reading my 9th Agatha Christie mystery for this month, it should be obvious that June will become a full blown Agatha Christie month.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I've discovered a website that has all of Christies' novels available for download as EPUB files. Of course, these files are unreadable on a Kindle until converted into MOBI. Fortunately, there's another website which can accommodate.

In addition to the eight novels read so far in June, I read two of the earliest novels at the end of May, making the total, so far, ten. I've tried, for the most part, to read these books in the order in which they were published.

Last night, I finished The Seven Dials Mystery. This novel was the second Christie novel to take place in and around the fictional estate - Chimneys (the first being The Secret of Chimneys ). There are a number of characters appearing in both books, and I suspect that Christie may have intended to develop this into a larger series. However, The Seven Dials Mystery received mostly unfavorable reviews when it was released, so Christie may have changed her mind on that.

I tend to agree with the reviewers of the time who thought that the novel started out well, but found the ending absolutely far fetched - The New York Times reviewer calling the solution "utterly preposterous".

I will say one thing; the ending took me by surprise.

Having finished The Seven Dials Mystery , I'm on to the first in the Miss Marple canon - The Murder at the Vicarage.