The Crescent of Intrigue: The Clocks | 1963

(image from here)

"Inspector Hardcastle walked in manfully. Unfortunately for him he was one of those men who have cat allergy. As usually happens on these occasions, all the cats immediately made for him. One jumped on his knees, another rubbed affectionately against his trousers. Detective Inspector Hardcastle, who was a brave man, set his lips and endured." -The Clocks, p. 62-63

The Sum of It:
Happy October, one and all! Fall is trying to creep in here in still much-too-warm Tennessee, and we are taking advantage of every minute of it! Our seasonally-appropriate first read from this past week (aka part one of our unplanned time-keeping themed reads, Emily will soon be posting on Hickory, Dickory, Dock) is Dame Agatha's 1963 The Clocks.

Regular girl Sheila Webb works as a typist at the Cavendish Secretarial and Typewriting Bureau (apparently primarily concerned with novels of the risqué variety), and one September day, is asked for PARTICULARLY by a Miss Pebmarsh at Wilbraham Crescent to stop by and type something up. Sheila is like uh, never heard of this lady, but I type for a lot of people so guess she's some rando that thinks I do a good job? A message has been left for Sheila to go ahead and let herself and make herself at home, so that's exactly what she does. However, the scene she finds is equal parts bizarre and terrifying. Miss Pebmarsh's front room is filled with clocks - one chiming the hour and the others stopped at 4:13 (#CREEPY) - AND, of course, a dead body. Sheila is horrified and goes shrieking from the house, falling literally into the arms of (we assume) handsome Colin Lamb, a "marine biologist" who is checking out Wilbraham Crescent out for totally NBD reasons (totally not, more on that later...)

The police are summoned and come to find that a) Miss Pebmarsh is blind, b) she did not ask for Sheila to come and type for her cause she's never heard of her before, c) she has no idea who this dead man is inside her house, and d) she only has one clock and wants to know where the other ones have come from! Colin Lamb buddies up with Detective Inspector Hardcastle to look into the case. Why does this passing random dude get to help, you ask? Well because he is a secret agent, of course! He has been checking up on Wilbraham Crescent (basically a bunch of town houses all in a half circle that are in two rows so the backs come up to each other? I think?) to follow up on a clue found in the pocket of a dead spy.

The dead man in Miss Pebmarsh's house is a total mystery. He looks super ordinary, he has a fake business card on him, and nobody is calling to say they're missing a person, so the police are a bit stumped. Inspector Hardcastle and Colin's canvassing of the neighborhood turns up a frazzled mom, an extremely entertaining, deeply committed cat lady, and some intense gardeners, but nothing to really go on. Suddenly Colin has an idea. He happens to know a guy. A guy who has been retired for some years...someone who might need a little cheering up. And there's nothing like a good mystery to cheer up Hercule Poirot!

The YOA Treatment:
As we are heading into the final few months of this Year of Agatha project (where has the time gone!?!?), it is fascinating to see the lifecycle of Agatha Christie's interests in writing. We have been reading her books for the most part fairly chronologically and you can see how her interests in classic detective mysteries and spy thrillers came and went. She of course starts out with Mysterious Affair at Styles, but then spends a great deal of time in her early years with the more caper-y novels like Secret of Chimneys, Seven Dials, etc., and then settles back into many years of the more traditional Roger Ackroyd, Death on the Nile, Murder at the Vicarage, etc. In her later years (where we are currently intrenched book-wise) she harkens back to her love of the thriller with They Came to Baghdad, Destination Unknown, Passenger to Frankfurt, etc., but with The Clocks, she has tried to do both. And I'm not sure if it works...

Poirot receives basically all of his information on the crime through Colin, an exercise of the little grey cells he has done before, and yet, since he doesn't really make an appearance until nearly halfway through the book, and so much of the crime-solving happens through Colin's eyes, Poirot seems a bit like an afterthought. It's as if Agatha really wanted to write another spy novel, yet this one set in England, and threw Poirot in to bring back the readers who maybe weren't as thrilled with Destination Unknown or They Came to Baghdad? I did enjoy this read. I think the premise is quite clever, and although the murder's solution isn't one of her most stellar, it is more plausible (in my opinion) than the wrap-up for Colin's secret agent-ness. Though not the Poirot and Hastings repartee fest of the 1930s-40s, The Clocks is still a great deal of fun and certainly worth the time of anyone needing a little Belgian detecting in their life.

-A.