Bundle Brent

Lady Eileen Brent, a fictional character known to her family and friends as "Bundle" Brent, was a spirited "It girl" in two novels of Agatha Christie (1890-1976), "The Secret of Chimneys" (1925) and "The Seven Dials Mystery" (1929). Following her marriage to a Foreign Office official, Bill Eversleigh, to whom she was affianced in the final chapter of "The Seven Dials Mystery", she would have been known as Lady Eileen Eversleigh.

Family

Bundle Brent was the eldest daughter of Clement Edward Alistair Blunt, 9th Marquess of Caterham. [Christie used the spelling "Marquis", although in Britain, this is usually applied only to Scottish creations that pre-date the Act of Union of 1707 (see "Whitaker's Almanack", annually). It is possible that the Caterham earldom was created earlier than 1707, but "Caterham", a town in Surrey, England, just south of Croydon, is not suggestive of a Scottish peerage.] She had two sisters, Daisy and Dulcie. She described her late mother as having “got tired of having nothing but girls and died. Her mother "thought someone else could take on the job of providing an heir”. [Agatha Christie (1925) "The Secret of Chimneys", Chapter 15] Bundle’s uncle, the 8th Marquess, was Foreign Secretary in the British Government (a circumstance possibly suggested by Marquess Curzon of Kedleston's having held that post from 1919-24).

Chimneys

The Brents' seat was Chimneys, a country house based on Abney Hall, Cheshire. [See Jared Cade (1998) "Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days"; Vanessa Wagstaff & Stephen Pool (2004) "Agatha Christie: A Reader’s Companion"] The family’s residual links with the Foreign Office, including the presumption, resented by the 9th Marquess, that the house would continue to be available for purposes of state, as it had been when his late brother was in Government, were an important ingredient of the two Chimneys novels.

Bundle Brent's character

Bundle’s age is not given in either novel, but it seems a reasonable conclusion that the years 1925-9 cover roughly her early to mid twenties. That would be consistent with ages given or hazarded for characters whom readers would assume were, broadly speaking, her contemporaries. As a child she was "long-legged" and "impish", [Agatha Christie (1929) "The Seven Dials Mystery", Chapter 12] growing into a “tall, dark” adult with an “attractive boyish face”. ["The Secret of Chimneys", Chapter 10] She was resourceful, headstrong, vivacious and charming, with sharp, penetrative grey eyes that could be disconcerting to others. ["The Secret of Chimneys", Chapter 16]

"Simply it"

Bundle was very much a young woman of her times, with many of the characteristics of a "flapper". Her future fiancé, drawing on terminology made popular by the film, "It" (1927), starring Clara Bow, remarked to a Foreign Office colleague, "Don't you know Bundle? Where have you been vegetating? She's simply it". ["The Seven Dials Mystery", Chapter 1] When Bundle's father, with whom she clearly had a strong bond, observed that “you modern young people seem to have such unpleasant ideas about love-making", she attributed this to her having read "The Sheik" ("Desert love. Throw her about, etc." ["The Secret of Chimneys", Chapter 21] ), the novel by Edith Maude Hull (1919) on which Rudolph Valentino's celebrated film of 1921 was based.

Bundle owned a Hispano-Suiza car, possibly an H6B, first marketed in 1922, though the model is not in fact identified. [See "The Agatha Christie Collection", Part 13 (Planet Three, 2002)] On her own admission, she tended to drive too fast and some, including Lord Caterham, were “terrified” of her driving. ["Secret of Chimneys", Chapter 24; "The Seven Dials Mystery", Chapter 5] On one occasion, she thought that she had run a man down, whereas in fact he had already been shot dead. ["The Seven Dials Mystery", Chapter 5] Bundle’s clothes were of the corsetless kind that young women favoured after the First World War; she wore only a “negligible trifle” under her dress. ["The Seven Dials Mystery", Chapter 19] Although her attitude to politics and politicians was somewhat ambiguous, she claimed to be a socialist and indeed was described by a future suitor as "a red hot socialist if she’s anything at all". ["The Secret of Chimneys", Chapter 3]

uitors

Bundle was attractive to men. Towards the end of "The Seven Dials Mystery", she received two proposals of marriage, the first from the Hon. George Lomax, a pompous Cabinet Minister, only five years younger than her father, who was known behind his back as "Codders" and was described inconguously as "His Majesty's permanent " [sic] " Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs". [If Lomax were the "permanent" Under Secretary, he would have been the official head of the Foreign Office: "i.e." a civil servant, rather than a politician. He could not be both permanent Under Secretary and a member of the Cabinet: see, for example, "The Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan 1938-1945" (ed David Dilks, 1971) (Cadogan was permanent head of the Foreign Office during the Second World War). There would have been a post of "Parliamentary" Under Secretary within the Government and it is possible that, if the Secretary of State were (as was the 8th Lord Caterham) a member of the House of Lords, the Parliamentary Under Secretary, who would have dealt with foreign affairs in the House of Commons, would have been accorded Cabinet membership. A further oddity is Lomax's style as "the Hon. George Lomax". This suggests that he was the son of a Viscount or Baron. This may well have been the case, although, if he were a Cabinet Minister, he would be a Privy Councillor and thus styled "Right Honourable", a distinction which would certainly have taken precedence ] Lomax's unctious self-assessment of his suitability as a husband, and of the role he saw for Bundle, had much in common with Mr. Collins' unsuccessful wooing of Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" (1813).

Lomax was duly rejected and Bundle opted instead for Bill Eversleigh (born "c." 1900 [In "The Secret of Chimneys". Eversleigh's age "at a guess" was 25.] ), one of Lomax's junior officials, described four years earlier as "very likeable" with a "pleasantly ugly face". ["The Secret of Chimneys", Chapter 1] Eversleigh plainly loved Bundle for herself, blurting out "darling, darling Bundle" several times when he thought she was dead ("I've killed her" ... "No, you haven't, you silly idiot" ["The Seven Dials Mystery", Chapter 31] ), and he was very acceptable to Lord Caterham because he was a scratch golfer.

In "The Seven Dials Mystery" Bundle told Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard, who appeared in both of the Chimneys novels, that he was a "wonderful man" and that she was sorry he was already married. ["The Seven Dials Mystery", Chapter 33]

Bundle Brent in the Chimneys novels

:"For main articles about the Chimneys novels, see The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery"

"The Secret of Chimneys" and "The Seven Dials Mystery" were published (and explicitly set) four years apart. The intervening period was momentous for Agatha Christie herself. "The Secret of Chimneys", which concerned the future of the Herzoslovakian royal family and their jewels, [Herzoslovakia was a fictional European state.] was widely regaded as the best of her earlier novels, [See, for example, Robert Barnard (1980) "A Talent to Deceive"] but marked the end of her association with the publisher Bodley Head. In 1926 she went missing for eleven days, ending up in an hotel in Harrogate, some two hundred miles from her home in Berkshire, [See generally Jared Cade (1998) "Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days"] and in 1928 she was divorced from her first husband.

"The Seven Dials Mystery" as a vehicle for Bundle

In "The Seven Dials Mystery", Bundle turned to amateur sleuthing after the death of two Foreign Office officials, both house guests of the Coote family, who had been renting Chimneys. She was drawn, with a male companion, to a secret society in the Seven Dials district of London, in effect competing with Superintendent Battle to get to the bottom of a sinister intrigue. According to her biographer, Christie played around with names and characters when drafting the story, although she always inteded it to be a vehicle for the energetic young woman she had introduced in "The Secret of Chimneys". [Janet Morgan (1984) "Agatha Christie"]

There were subtle differences between the Bundle of 1925 and that of 1929. Despite such consistent traits as her fast driving, she was seen as more mature in the second novel. For example, Lomax, who, in "The Secret of Chimneys" had dismissed her as "charming, simply charming, but quite a child", ["The Secret of Chimneys", Chapter 3] reminded her father, in "The Seven Dials Mystery", that "she is no longer a child. She is a very charming and talented woman"; ["The Seven Dials Mystery", Chapter 29] and, of course, by then, Lomax wished to marry her. Bundle's role was, any case, more central in "Seven Dials"; despite Battle's crucial contribution, she was clearly the heroine and intended to be so.

Wodehousian comparisons

Several commentators have drawn parallels between the Chimneys novels, with their light hearted banter and amusing characters, and those of the humorist P. G. Wodehouse, [See, for example, "The Agatha Christie Collection": Part 11 (Planet Three, 2002)] of whom Agatha Christie was a great admirer. Christie herself described "The Seven Dials Mystery" as "the light-hearted thriller type". [Agatha Christie (1977) "An Autobiography"] Lord Caterham was in the mould of eccentric Wodehousian peers, such as the Earl of Emsworth, who was also the ninth of his line; Bill Eversleigh has been described as "an aimiable if vacuous young man who has staggered in from a Wodehouse novel"; [Vanessa Wagstaff & Stephen Pool (2004) "Agatha Christie: A Reader’s Companion"] while Bundle herself could easily have been one of Wodehouse's feisty young women, the archetype of which, Bobbie Wickham, [Geoffrey Jaggard (1967) "Wooster’s World"] first appeared in "Mr Mulliner Speaking" in 1929. There was even an aunt, Marcia, Dowager Marchioness of Caterham, who, having thought Bundle lived largely for pleasure, nevertheless recognised (as did George Lomax) her potential as a political hostess. ["The Seven Dials Mystery", Chapter 12] In this context, Aunt Agatha's aspirations for Bertie Wooster in the Wodehouse books have a certain resonance, while Lord Caterham's ready acceptance of Eversleigh's golfing credentials matched Lord Emsworth's preference for young people who showed interest in his pigs.

Bundle Brent on television

A dramatistaion of "The Seven Dials Mystery" was broadcast by London Weekend Television in 1980, with Cheryl Campbell (born 1949) in the role of Bundle Brent.

Notes