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........

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