| The Clocks | |
|---|---|
Dust-jacket illustration of the first UK edition |
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| Author(s) | Agatha Christie |
| Cover artist | Michael Harvey |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Crime novel |
| Publisher | Collins Crime Club |
| Publication date | November 7 1963 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 256 pp (first edition, hardcover) |
| ISBN | NA |
| Preceded by | The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side |
| Followed by | A Caribbean Mystery |
The Clocks is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on November 7, 1963[1] and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company the following year[2][3]. It features the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. The UK edition retailed at sixteen shillings (16/-)[1] and the US edition at $4.50[3].
The novel is notable for the fact that Poirot never visits any of the crime scenes or speaks to any of the witnesses or suspects, since he is challenged to prove his oft-made boast that a crime can be solved by the exercise of the intellect alone. The novel also marks the return of partial first-person narrative, a technique that Christie had largely abandoned earlier in the Poirot sequence but which she had employed in the previous Ariadne Oliver novel, The Pale Horse (1961).
Contents |
Sheila Webb, a typist-for-hire, arrives at her afternoon appointment on Wilbraham Crescent to find a well-dressed corpse surrounded by six clocks, four of which are stopped at 4:13. When a blind woman enters the house, Sheila runs screaming into the street and into the arms of a young man who plays a key part in the investigation that follows.
It is while visiting Wilbraham Crescent that Special Branch agent Colin “Lamb” finds Sheila running into his arms. He is there investigating areas connected with crescents or the moon while following up a clue to the route by which classified information is leaving the country.
At 19 Wilbraham Crescent an investigation begins into the murder. The corpse has a business card in its pocket indicating that the bearer is an insurance salesman called “R. H. Curry”. This turns out to be a false lead, since neither the company nor the salesman exists.
A colourful group of neighbours is interviewed by Inspector Hardcastle with Lamb in attendance, and things begin to look bleaker for Sheila when her aunt, Mrs. Lawton, is questioned. It seems that Sheila’s other forename is Rosemary, the name on a leather travel clock found at the scene of the murder. Frustrated, Colin--who has fallen for Sheila--approaches Hercule Poirot, an old friend of his father, to investigate the case, challenging him to do so from his armchair as he had always claimed was possible. He leaves the celebrated detective with detailed notes on the investigation thus far.
After the inquest, Edna Brent, one of Sheila’s fellow secretaries, is confused by something said in evidence, and attempts to draw it to Hardcastle’s attention; but he is too busy to speak to her. Soon she is found dead in a telephone box on Wilbraham Crescent, strangled with her own scarf.
After the police weary of their investigations into the dead man's identity, a woman called Merlina Rival (original name Florence Gapp) makes an appearance and claims the dead man was her husband, Harry Castleton.
Colin makes an important discovery when he finds a ten-year-old girl, Geraldine Brown, who has been observing the events at Wilbraham Crescent with a pair of opera glasses while confined to her room. She reveals that a new laundry service delivered a heavy basket of laundry on the day of the murder.
Miss Rival returns to the police to state that her late husband had a scar behind his ear, but the police tell her the cut is only a few years old, despite her claim that he got the scar years ago. Later, it becomes known that the killer is paying her to say this to the police; and her fate as a partner in crime is to be stabbed to death at a bus station.
Poirot’s explanation is based on his inference that since the appearance of complexity must conceal quite a simple murder. The clocks are therefore a red herring, as is the presence of Sheila and the confusion about the corpse’s identity.
What Edna realised, having returned early to the secretarial bureau because of the damage to her shoe, is that Miss Martindale never took any telephone call that arranged Sheila to visit Miss Pebmarsh’s house. Miss Martindale, one of the conspirators in the murder, is secretly the sister of Mrs. Bland, one of the neighbors of 19 Wilbraham Crescent. The first wife was heiress to the overseas fortune, but when news of it reached the Blands they decided that the second Mrs. Bland must pose as the heiress in order to obtain the money. When, however, Quentin Duguesclin, who knew the first wife, decided to look her up in England, a plan was laid to murder him and relocate the body to Miss Pebmarsh’s house. Miss Rival was murdered before she could leak information to the police, as the killer could take no chances.
At the end of the novel, Colin also unravels the mystery of 19 Wilbraham Crescent and its owner Miss Pebmarsh.
Francis Iles (Anthony Berkeley Cox) reviewed the novel in The Guardian's issue of December 20, 1963 when he said, "About Miss Agatha Christie's The Clocks I am not so sure. This begins well, with the discovery of a stranger in a suburban sitting-room, with four strange clocks all showing the same time; but thereafter the story, though as readable as ever, does tends to hang fire. Also there is one very corny item, the vital witness killed when on the point of disclosing crucial information, which is quite unworthy of Miss Christie."[4]
Maurice Richardson of The Observer of November 10, 1963 concluded, "Not as zestful as usual. Plenty of ingenuity about the timing, though."[5]
Robert Barnard: "Lively, well-narrated, highly unlikely late specimen - you have to accept two spies and three murderers living in one small-town crescent. The business of the clocks, fantastic and intriguing in itself, fizzles out miserably at the end. Contains (chapter 14) Poirot's considered reflections on other fictional detectives, and the various styles and national schools of crime writing."[6]
An adaptation for the ITV series Agatha Christie's Poirot, with David Suchet as Poirot, was produced for the show's twelfth season. Guest stars include Tom Burke as Lieutenant Colin Race, Jaime Winstone as Sheila Webb, Anna Massey as Miss Pebmarsh, and Lesley Sharp as Miss Martindale. Charles Palmer (who also directed Hallowe'en Party for the series) directs this installment, with the screenplay being written by Stewart Harcourt (who also wrote the screenplay for Murder on the Orient Express).
A few changes were made to this version, but unlike other adaptations for this series, the main plot structure was largely left in place. The plot includes two major threads, neither of which has anything to do with the other. The main thread involves a young secretary named Sheila Webb. She receives word from her employer, Miss Martindale (who runs the Cavendish Secretarial Bureau) that Webb has been specifically requested at the home of Ms. Pebmarsh at 3:00 that day. Webb is told by Martindale to let herself into Pebmarsh's house if no one is home. Webb does as she is told and sits in the parlor waiting for her client, Pebmarsh. While waiting, she notices that there are five clocks in the room. One is a cuckoo clock that is set to the correct time. The other four clocks are all set to the same, wrong time, 4:13. We later learn that Webb is deeply unsettled by this number because it is the room number of a hotel where she is carrying on a meaningless affair with a Professor, mostly out of a sense of loneliness. Further jarring Webb is that one of the four clocks set to 4:13 belongs to her, in fact it is her most personal possession, as it was supposedly given by her mother before Webb was giving up for adoption as a baby. Webb had lost the clock a few weeks before when she took it to a jeweler to be repaired. Sitting in Pebmarsh's parlor, Webb then sees the dead man lying on the floor, stabbed. Screaming, she runs out of the house and into the arms of the Colin Lamb figure (now bearing the surname of 'Race' and identified as Colonel Race's son), who happened to be on the street investigating the spy conspiracy that makes up the other main thread in the story. Lamb and the police investigate, and Webb becomes the prime suspect, though Lamb has fallen in love with Webb and does not believe her to be guilty. The police find the missing clock in Webb's possession. They assume it means she murdered the unknown man, but really she only took it because of its significance to her and because it might implicate her.
Webb has a friend at the Cavendish Bureau named Nora. They attend the inquest together, at which many people give testimony. After the inquest, Nora desperately tries to inform the police about something, saying that someone who testified at the inquest was lying (and indicating this person is a woman). Before Nora can provide fuller information to the police, she is strangled in a public phone box. The police have no luck identifying the dead man on Pebmarsh's floor. Finally, a woman comes forward after reading the dead man's description in the newspaper and identifies the dead man as her husband, who she has not seen for many years. To perfect the identification, she says he is a scar behind his left ear and she is correct. The police are about to arrest Webb for the murder when Poirot intervenes (unlike the book, he is present during the entire police investigation). As in the book, Poirot learns that Miss Martindale is actually the sister of Mrs. Bland, who lives in great wealth with her husband in a home quite near Pebmarsh. The Blands say that their money comes from an inheritance to Mrs. Bland from her family in Canada. But it turns out that Martindale's sister is actually the second Mrs. Bland. The first Mrs. Bland, who died of natural causes, was the real heiress. But when they learned that the dead Mrs. Bland was going to be very wealthy, Mr. Bland, the second Mrs. Bland, and her sister (Miss Martindale) devise a plan for the second Mrs. Bland to impersonate the first Mrs. Bland to inherit the fortune. The dead man was an acquaintance of the first Mrs. Bland, who happened to be traveling in England and wanted to visit the first Mrs. Bland. Realizing that he would see through the deception, Mr. Bland and Miss Martindale lured him to Mr. Bland's home, drugged his drink, and had him delivered to Pebmarsh's house hidden in a laundry delivery van. Getting him into Pebmarsh's living room, Mr. Bland stabbed him. Poirot realized that Mr. Bland and Miss Martindale sought to establish a crime scene that was bizarre and included so many red herrings that it would confuse and confound the police. First, the dead man is very hard to identify because he is from Canada and has no connection to Dover. Second, the dead man has no connection at all to Pebmarsh. He was simply killed in her parlor to throw the police off. Third, setting it up so Webb would discover the dead man, since she also had no connection to the dead man or the Blands. And fourth, the elaborate and bizarre ruse of the clocks, which had no real meaning but were intended to be bizarre. In fact, Miss Martindale read about the clocks and some of the other plot points in an unpublished novel by a detective fiction writer for whose estate she still provided secretarial services. In that story, the clocks and other devices were also used to act as red herrings to confuse the police. The only significance of the clocks was to be bizarre and unexplainable, and to distress Webb with a reminder of her meaningless affair. However, Nora, who broke her shoe and returned from lunch early on the day of the murder, knew for a fact that Miss Martindale did not receive any phone call requesting that Webb go to Pebmarsh's house that day, as Martindale testified at the inquest. When Nora tried to tell the police that "she" was lying at the inquest, Nora was referring to Martindale. Overhearing this in the hallway outside the inquest, Martindale took the opportunity to strangle Nora. Finally, the Blands and Martindale hired an actress, Ms. Rival, to pretend to be the dead man's wife. When it became clear that Ms. Rival was falling apart and not up to the challenge, Mr. Bland lured her to a rendez vous and murdered her, bringing their death toll to three in all.
The second threat involved Pebmarsh and her neighbor, who are caught by Colin and Naval Intelligence smuggling secrets out of England for the benefit of Germany. Pebmarsh's motive is that her sons died in World War I and she prefers England to have very weak defenses so that any German invasion will succeed quickly and other English boys will not die. Another subplot involves two neighbors of Pebmarsh posing as English academics, but who are really German Jews fleeing persecution. They play no role in either the spy conspiracy or the murders. The McNaughtons do not appear.
The role of Miss Pebmarsh was Anna Massey's last before her death, and the ITV broadcast of the episode is dedicated to her memory.
The novel was first serialised in the UK weekly magazine Woman's Own in six abridged instalments from November 9 - December 14, 1963 with illustrations by Herb Tauss. It was advertised as being serialised prior to the publication of the book; however this had already appeared on November 7.
In the US a condensed version of the novel appeared in the January 1964 (Volume 156, Number 1) issue of Cosmopolitan with illustrations by Al Parker.
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