The Clocks: A Body, Four Strange Clocks and Poirot Solving a Crime from His Armchair
Sheila Webb, a hired typist, arrived at 19 Wilbraham Crescent in the seaside town of Crowdean to take on a new job. What she finds is a well-dressed corpse surrounded by clocks. Miss Pebmarsh, the blind owner of No. 19, denies all knowledge of calling Sheila’s secretarial agency and asking for her by name, but someone did. Nor does she own so many clocks. And no one seems to know the victim.
Author: Agatha Christie (1890–1976)
Title: The Clocks (1963)
Format: English Kindle edition
Series: Hercule Poirot
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/B0046RE5BI (ASIN B0046RE5BI)
Colin Lamb
Colin Lamb, a young intelligence specialist working on a case of his own at the nearby naval dockyard, is at the scene at the moment of Sheila Webb’s gruesome discovery. Lamb knows only one man who can properly investigate a crime as strange and baffling as what happened inside No. 19: his friend and mentor, Hercule Poirot.
An Armchair Detective
What makes the book unusual is that Poirot barely leaves his flat. He listens to Lamb’s account, reads the evidence and reasons his way to the truth, a real exercise in the ’little grey cells’, while the espionage plot and the murder plot twist around each other.
Four Clocks at 4.13
The image that gives the book its title is deliberately bizarre. In Miss Pebmarsh’s sitting room, alongside her own clocks, there are four extra clocks that she says she has never seen, all stopped at 4.13, although the real time is nearly three o’clock. One of them bears the name "Rosemary" on the back. The dead man carries no identification, and nobody in Wilbraham Crescent admits to knowing him. Christie piles absurdity on absurdity, then lets Poirot argue that the very complexity of the scene is a clue.
Poirot the Critic
The book’s most delightful chapter has Poirot holding forth on detective fiction itself. Bored in retirement, he has been reading crime novels, and he gives his opinions on them, praising Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories and Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room, and gently mocking his friend, the novelist Ariadne Oliver. It is Christie talking about her own craft through her most famous creation, and fans will relish it.
A Narrator on a Spy Hunt
Much of the story is narrated by Colin Lamb, a young intelligence officer investigating a leak at a naval establishment, whose search for a spy runs alongside the police inquiry led by his friend, Detective Inspector Hardcastle. Christie hints that Colin is the son of Superintendent Battle, an old colleague of Poirot’s. The neighbours in Wilbraham Crescent, including a woman who lives with a houseful of cats and a bedridden child who watches the street through binoculars, provide comic relief and vital information.
Late Christie
Published in 1963, when Christie was in her seventies, it reflects Cold War anxieties about spies and secrets. Critics often find her late novels uneven, and the solution here is complicated, but the opening is among her most striking, and the 2011 adaptation with David Suchet kept the central puzzle.
Who Will Enjoy It
Readers who like a puzzle with a strange, surreal opening, and Christie fans curious to hear Poirot talk about the genre itself. Newcomers may prefer to start with one of the classic 1930s novels and come to this later, when the in-jokes about Ariadne Oliver and detective fiction will mean more. It is also one of the few Poirot novels in which he solves the case almost entirely from his armchair.
Why Read It
It is a late Christie with a bold, almost surreal premise and a lively narrator. If you enjoy impossible situations, the clocks will keep you guessing until the end.
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