Say the name Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple and you know you’re keeping company with one of the world-class detectives created by crime queen Agatha Christie.
Even people who’ve never read any of her books are familiar with the Belgian brainbox and the shrewd English spinster.
Bundle Brent? Not so much. Yet a century after she was written into being by the author, Lady Eileen Brent (to give Bundle her proper name) has finally been discovered by Netflix and is about to become very famous indeed.
She’s the Christie supersleuth at the heart of Seven Dials, the streamer’s three-parter that will air later this month.
Despite being set in 1925, it’s far from a traditional costume drama.
Bundle, who’s 20, was an ultra-contemporary character in her own time, but has now been re-imagined with a bit of Gen Z attitude.
Based on the 1929 novel by Agatha Christie, Netflix murder mystery Seven Dials takes place in 1925
BAFTA Rising Star winner Mia McKenna-Bruce stars in the lead role as Lady Eileen ‘Bundle’ Brent
She’s an individualist who doesn’t give a fig for hierarchical structures such as the aristocracy she was born into; she’s hot on politics but lukewarm about wealth; she’s pragmatic and adaptable.
If she were alive today, she’d probably be on TikTok telling everyone how to run a stately home on a budget, fighting for women’s rights and insisting on a career that aligns with her personal values.
Bundle’s also very cool. When the terrifically annoying Foreign Office mandarin George Lomax proposes marriage, she jumps clean out of a window in horror, lands in a flower bed, wipes the soil off her skirt and walks away. There’s no need for a husband and a ring when crime-busting beckons.
She’s played with rebellious dash by BAFTA Rising Star winner Mia McKenna-Bruce, whose peaches-and-cream complexion belies her pistol-packing (literally) nature.
Helena Bonham Carter is her mother, Lady Caterham, and Martin Freeman is the stoical Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard whom Bundle is always trying to outmanoeuvre.
‘Bundle is someone you couldn’t say no to, or she wouldn’t let anyone say no to her,’ says Mia. ‘It’s also the flapper era, a time of rebellion for women. She has an answer for everything and a real love of words, so she knows how to get what she wants.
‘But she has a connection with people too. There’s a line in the first episode that’s in the book as well, where a character says, “Isn’t she just it”, and I think that’s it, there’s no real way to describe her.
‘She’s like a piece of magic, that everyone loves and everyone listens to, even though the odds are stacked against her.
‘Supposedly there are traits in Bundle that were from Agatha herself, how she was a pioneer, adventurous and brave. I think that’s particularly highlighted in this adaptation with Bundle – she’s so strong and driven. Agatha seemed to be a woman who did things on her terms, she didn’t need to justify herself, and that’s Bundle too; she didn’t have to explain herself to people.’
To be clear, Bundle wasn’t written by Agatha Christie as an autobiographical character but they share several defining characteristics.
They’re both formidably clever, forward-looking and intrepid. The author was born four decades before women won equal voting rights – an issue that comes up repeatedly in Seven Dials – yet she wrote books that would go on to sell a billion copies in English and the same amount again in translation.
Only the Bible and Shakespeare have outsold her.
She was a qualified apothecary’s assistant, which is why her killers use poison and sleeping draughts with aplomb, and is believed to have been the first Western woman to have learned to surf, catching waves in Hawaii in the 1920s.
The writer was also an avid traveller, spending time in the Middle East with her second husband, the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan.
She used to go on digs with him and clean his artefacts with her face cream.
So maybe we do see a bit of her in Bundle, who picks locks with her own hairpin; never carries a handbag, preferring to stuff things in her pockets; wears men’s brogues; and dashes about everywhere in a bright red Lagonda car.
On screen, the action opens with a flashback to Ronda, Spain, in 1920, with Iain Glen as an Englishman abroad in a pale linen suit, about to meet a sticky end with a bull.
The Andalusian town’s iconic white bullring offers a startling contrast to what comes next – a masked ball at Chimneys, Bundle’s family pile. (More than 100 extras dressed in 20s fashions were crammed into rooms at Badminton House in Gloucestershire to recreate that scene.)
Bundle looks sensational, with a modish French version of the classic 1920s bob – Mia cut off her own hair for the role and donated it to charity – and a dress of molten gold. ‘It’ll be fun!’ she says with characteristic brio to her rather less elegant mother. ‘No, it won’t,’ curses Lady Caterham. ‘These people make my kidneys ache.’
Nobody does posh but dishevelled quite like Helena Bonham Carter, who looks every inch the kind of woman who’d like a moat to keep new money and the hoi polloi at bay. Her own costume, a vintage Edwardian party dress sourced from a Paris market, was ‘genuinely disintegrating, which helped me get into character’ she says.
The next morning, the guests are just settling down to have breakfast (with a side order of liver salts beneath a silver cloche) when the first body is discovered and Agatha Christie’s whodunnit truly begins.
There follows another murder, a battle for ownership of a scientific discovery, a chum unveiled as a villain and a character who turns out to be a kind of prototype 007 hiding in plain sight.
Bundle must stay one step ahead of it all as she digs into a conspiracy involving politicians, industrialists and high society. What is the meaning of the seven clocks arranged at the scene of the first murder, and can it be found at a seedy nightclub in the rough Seven Dials area of London? Is Battle her ally or her enemy?
This all keeps the spotlight relentlessly on Mia, who had to have lessons in dancing, movement and accent to ensure she looked and sounded as Bundle would have done in 1925.
Etiquette expert Major David Rankin-Hunt, who advised on The Crown, was also on hand to keep things upper crust.
By the end, the only skill she hadn’t mastered was how to make tea the old-fashioned way.
‘Bundle was having to make a cup of tea, and there was an etiquette to how she poured it that I couldn’t get my head around,’ Mia recalls. ‘There was a tea strainer… what’s wrong with a tea bag, I don’t know!
‘So I was trying to do my lines, shaking this tea strainer, thinking, “Do I do you next? No, I was supposed to do you next…”
‘Then there’s an order for the water and milk: you’re supposed to put the water in first because it proves you have high-quality china that can withstand hot water. Can you imagine thinking about all that when you’re trying to remember your lines?’
It proved such a palaver that the scene had to be cut, but there are many other pure Christie moments: the one when a character declaims, ‘Someone in this room knows more than they are telling us’; a curious but critical item of evidence (in this case, a half-burned fire glove with teeth marks on it); and the author’s gimlet eye for class and manners – for example, nouveau riche metals tycoon Sir Oswald Coote may have the cash to rent Chimneys for the season, but doesn’t know how to behave towards its staff.
‘Thank you, Tredwell,’ he says to the butler as he reaches for another saucer of champagne. ‘Did he just thank you, Tredwell?’ asks Bundle’s horrified mother.
‘I’m afraid so m’lady,’ the butler replies, looking equally appalled.
The 1929 book on which this drama is based, The Seven Dials Mystery, has been filmed once before, back in 1981, with Cheryl Campbell as Bundle.
This new version was written by Chris Chibnall, whose 2013 TV masterpiece Broadchurch was inspired by his love of Agatha Christie’s multi-layered mysteries.
He also has an executive producer credit, alongside Suzanne Mackie, who worked on all six seasons of The Crown.
It’s a formidable pairing that suggests there’ll be more Bundle Brent stories to come. Indeed, Netflix has gone so far as to say Seven Dials marks its entry into ‘the wider Christie universe’.
‘Chris Chibnall has almost “out Agatha’d” Agatha!’ says Helena Bonham Carter. ‘I didn’t see the ending coming, but it makes total sense when you find out!’
Martin Freeman says he signed up for the role of Supt Battle purely on the strength of the script. ‘Chris’s writing is what drew me to this adaptation. It was funny and had the spirit of Agatha Christie from the original material.’
What it does not have, though, is an identical plot. Readers of the book may be surprised by how much the TV adaptation diverges from it.
There’s a focus on different characters and a climactic scene on a train in which – I say! – things take such a turn the guard spills his tea and the waiters in the dining car drop the soup.
Even the final revelation of the identity and meaning of the Seven Dials differs slightly from the one in the book.
But before purists start panicking, it’s worth remembering the Agatha Christie estate has always been bold in its decision-making, preferring to preserve her legacy with Hercule Poirot continuation novels written by contemporary crime queen Sophie Hannah, rather than see her work set in aspic.
The outcome of the estate’s new union with Netflix is a stylish, hectic three hours of TV. After the baddies are cuffed and the true purpose of the Seven Dials is made clear to Bundle, the only question unanswered is: when will there be another crime for her to solve?
As her mother warns: ‘People who go looking for trouble usually find it’, and Bundle looks like she’s well up for that.
Seven Dials is available to stream exclusively on Netflix from 15 January
