Reviewing “The Clocks” by Agatha Christie

It started out with such promise. 

A young typist with a shadowy past is assigned to go to 19 Wilbraham Crescent. Said typist, Sheila Webb, goes to said address…and finds a corpse surrounded by clocks. Just as she has discovered the dead man, a blind woman comes in—the real owner of the house, Miss Pebmarsh. Sheila goes hysterical and runs out into the street, bumping into marine biologist Colin Lamb—who, luckily, is actually a British spy who has friends in the police force, and thus can instantly become a first-person narrator.

Third-person narrative takes turns with Colin as he joins Detective Inspector Hardcastle on the routine rounds of interviewing all the possible suspects, most of them neighbors who are Rather Suspicious. Somewhere along the line Christie remembered that she meant this to be a Hercule Poirot novel, so she has Colin also coincidentally be old friends with the famous detective. Colin visits Poirot at his home, where Poirot is going bonkers from boredom. After a rather awkward diatribe of various mystery writers, Colin finally gives Poirot the Cliffs Notes of what has happened so far. Poirot proceeds to stay in his flat for almost the entirety of the book, only showing up at the end as a Belgian ex Machina to solve the crime without doing any legwork.

In my opinion, the quality of the writing deteriorated as soon as Sheila ran out of the house. (Having the “heroine” run into the arms of the “hero”? Bleah.) From thereon in, The Clocks progresses through so many poor choices in plot, pacing, theme, and character development, I almost would suspect that someone else wrote this, not the Queen of Mystery herself.

Without giving too much away, allow me to vent a partial list of my grievances:

• Colin Lamb’s narrative is obnoxious, as is his love for Sheila.
• Sheila is set up to be a heroine, but immediately fades into the background.
• The clues are unevenly sprinkled through the text so that certain parts of the mystery are too obvious, while certain pieces of the puzzle are obscured so that only Poirot can see them.
• What was with that weird monologue of Poirot’s on the pros and cons of Sherlock Holmes and Arsene Dupin? There was way too much leaning on the fourth wall here, with Christie practically interrupting her novel to say “Oh by the way yes I ripped off Doyle when I created the Hastings character.”
• The whole side character who says “I know something that I must tell the police…oh I guess it can wait” and immediately is killed. Really?
• Christie is usually clever with her red herrings. But in this case, it just seemed like she had created an interesting plot point and then decided to drop it because she couldn’t follow through.
• The actual spy stuff could (and should) have been super exciting, but ultimately fell flat, maybe because Christie kept skirting around the Cold War by using euphemism.
• Some of Christie’s best stuff is the result of her breaking the rules or doing something completely different. In this book, there were strange echoes from previous novels, almost like she had cobbled together aspects of other stories.
• Since he was hardly in the book, it doesn’t feel like Poirot should have been in it, at all. That he is required to solve the mystery shows how dull the other characters are. Even Poirot should not really have been able to solve the plot, particularly from such a distance from the action—but we’re supposed to believe he’s capable of it anyway because Little Grey Cells.

In short, The Clocks was (pardon the pun) not worth the time.