Seven Dials: Netflix series turns Agatha Christie’s country-house mystery into a study of empire and war

It is 1925 and the scene is Chimneys. It’s the English stately pile of the Caterham family, but the penurious Lady Caterham (Helena Bonham Carter), has been forced to rent it to the industrial magnate Sir Oswald Coote (Mark Lewis Jones).

Inside the house, a party is in full swing and the misanthropic Lady Caterham, a visitor in her own house, observes to her daughter, Lady Eileen “Bundle” Brent (Mia McKenna Bruce), that the guests are “industry, aristocracy, and the foreign office”.

Agatha Christie’s The Seven Dials Mystery, published in 1929, is now a lavish three-part Netflix series written by Chris Chibnall and directed by Chris Sweeney. This new adaptation uses Christie’s puzzle of the seven dials not just to entertain, but to confront the political and imperial world her novels often leave implicit.

During the party, the young men of the foreign office play a prank on their colleague by setting eight alarm clocks in his room timed to go off at 11.15am the next morning. Why? Because their colleague famously sleeps late.

When one of the clocks goes missing, later found by Bundle on the lawn, and the other seven are arranged neatly on the bedroom’s mantelpiece, Bundle is perplexed. And there’s a death – naturally.

Despite the suggestion that the victim was under stress in his work (a contemporary reference to the rapid rise in mental health issues in young men), Bundle rejects the verdict that he took his own life. Her certainty is compounded when she later comes upon another young male victim, whose final words are “seven dials”. But what is he really referring to? Bundle intends to find out.

Trailed by a figure unknown to her, her pursuit of her shadow leads her to Scotland Yard and to Inspector Battle (Martin Freeman, no stranger to sleuthing having played Watson in the BBC Sherlock Holmes series). Bundle mirrors Irene Adler from Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Scandal in Bohemia (1891). In the story, Adler follows a disguised Holmes to Baker Street and becomes the only person ever to outwit the detective.

Like Adler before her, the intrepid Bundle is a feminist trailblazer. McKenna Bruce is superb, occupying the role with aplomb. In Christie’s novel Bundle cannot sit still. In the series she jumps out of an upper-storey window in Chimneys to avoid a proposal of marriage from a boring and older MP, George Lomax (Alex Macqueen), landing in the garden where Kettle is investigating the evidence. She has made her choice.

What Netflix adds to Christie’s original

The Netflix series is a more straightforward thriller than Christie’s novel. In the introduction to the 2026 signature edition of the novel, which comes with new cover art and design from Netflix, Val McDermid posits that Christie operates on the terrain of thriller pastiche, sending up the masculine John Buchan-type thrillers of the 1910s and 1920s. She is also Jane Austen-like with her ironic take on the aristocracy, the nouveaux riche and purposeless young men and women.

The series echoes Christie’s critique of the rigid social structures of the 1920s. Bonham Carter’s Lady Caterham observes that Lady Coote should not thank servants, Sir Oswald Coote declares that he can buy class. But it does more too: Christie avoided references to the first world war, writing in the decade after its ending. During the war, she worked dispensing medicines for the Voluntary Aid Detachment of the British Red Cross in Torquay (where she learned all about poison). By contrast war is embedded into the Netflix series.

Bundle has lost her brother in the conflict and her connection to the young foreign office men is a comradeship made through war. They are survivors of a sort. Life, Bundle says, is “far too short”. Her late brother Tommy served with the foreign office’s Gerry Wade (Corey Mylchreest), who recovered his body.

In the series’ climax, Lady Caterham, powerfully articulated by Bonham Carter, describes the war as an “abattoir” with no “glory”. She lives, Miss Havisham-like, in a house where a bucket catches the drops of water from a leaky roof and the footman doesn’t get paid. As Bundle discovers (in line with the thriller genre) no one is what they seem to be.

But the most chilling indictment of European empires and the social structures they support is articulated by Dr Cyril Matip (Nyasha Hatendi), a brilliant Cameroonian inventor whom Lomax tries to get to work for Britain by inviting him to his country pile.

When Lomax puts on a pheasant shoot to entertain Matip, the inventor refuses to participate – he has seen what guns can do. Meanwhile, Bundle’s eyes rest on a shot pheasant in the grass. At dinner, Matip describes the impact of war and his distrust of Europeans. He has seen how “Africans have fought other Africans for white Europeans”.

In homage to Christie’s most famous work, Murder on the Orient Express, the climax occurs on a train. But not all is over. The final secret – that of the seven dials – is still to be revealed. Seven Dials refreshes Christie for our times, and it does it admirably. Christie still has much to say. We underestimate her at our peril.

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Catherine Wynne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.