An odd mix of murder mystery and spy intrigue, The Clocks is a bit overstuffed and rough around the edges, but Christie’s light touch and humour make this uneven novel very enjoyable despite its shortcomings.
Talk about a bad day at work. When young Sheila Webb is sent out by her secretarial agency to the home of a blind elderly lady, Miss Pebmarsh, the last thing she expects to find is a dead body of an older gentleman surrounded by a multitude of clocks all pointing to the same wrong time. She runs screaming from the scene and straight into the arms of Colin Lamb, a young man in spy business pursuing his own investigation. Stranger still, Miss Pebmarsh categorically denies requesting Sheila’s services in the first place.
Though it’s unclear if the murdered man has anything to do with international espionage, Colin tags along with his friend Inspector Hardcastle, who visits the odd assortment of characters living next door to Miss Pebmarsh in the genteel, old-fashioned Wilbraham Crescent. When the mysterious victim still remains unidentified and the pair haven’t gotten much further in their search for motive or clues, Colin turns for help to his father’s good friend Hercule Poirot. Now in his advanced years, the little Belgian is a bit lonely and bored, and welcomes a chance to piece together this baffling mystery of murder and many clocks.
The Clocks just barely qualifies as a Poirot novel: the famed detective first enters almost halfway into the story, and amounts to a cameo. Seen through Colin’s eyes, his characterisation here is quite eccentric, more so than usual. Poirot often ends discussions of the case with cryptic and teasing recitals of children’s rhymes, and during the first meeting with Colin he spends about five pages commenting on the merits of contemporary and classic crime fiction, including Christie’s own fictional authoress Mrs Ariadne Oliver. I wouldn’t say that Poirot’s appearance here is forced exactly, but his involvement just doesn’t feel as natural as in most Poirot novels.
If I was to sum up the main flaw of the novel, I’d describe it as unnecessarily cumbersome, both in plot and style. Its Plot B about spying shenanigans is only vaguely sketched and not terribly effective. I figured out straight away where Colin went wrong in his investigation, and though it gave me a nice smug feeling it made the spy storyline even less interesting to follow. It also relies on one hell of a coincidence and what felt like one secret identity too many in order to somewhat tie Plot A and Plot B together. I quite liked Colin’s first-person narration, and would have preferred to read the whole novel from his point of view, with the entire spy plot scrapped in favour of a tighter narrative.
The principal murder mystery is not without issues either. Christie does play fair and Poirot’s deductions mostly depend on his ability to notice tiny details that most people would never pick up on, but she does leave a few too many unexplained loose ends for my liking. There’s also a strangely flat feeling to the resolution that has no particular emotional resonance for any major character we might care about. Another odd aspect I noticed was the weird lack of follow-up for a character who wonders out loud if they should have mentioned some small thing to the police. Usually you can bet that this small undisclosed fact is actually very important, but it’s as if Christie completely forgot about it and left it hanging without payoff.
Fortunately, lightness and humour made the novel an enjoyable read despite my many complaints; it’s definitely a book to be cherished for the journey rather than destination. I particularly liked the amusing descriptions of Colin and Inspector Hardcastle’s visits to the neighbours, including a hardcore crazy cat lady whose darlings send poor Inspector’s cat allergies through the roof. The light tone was very much reminiscent of Christie’s delightful early spy thrillers and I didn’t quite expect to find it in one of her later-day novels.
What was expected were the many references to changing times you normally see from older Christie, including the familiar anxiety about mentally ill patients being released from the hospitals, and soulless modern buildings full of working drones springing all over the place. A more humorous lament concerns the lack of all-seeing old ladies who, back in the day, would have made for natural witnesses to a crime, but who are now sadly confined to the homes for the elderly.
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