Spy-murder mashup ‘The Clocks’ (1963) is worth your time

“The Clocks” (1963) is a fun and entertaining late-career novel for Poirot, although he isn’t introduced until halfway through the events. He solves the case almost entirely from his armchair next to the hearth with a mug of hot chocolate nearby – to keep away that impending winter chill, even if it’s still fall.

I grade this Agatha Christie novel short of full marks because she uses some conveniences to get to the answers. Also, Colin Lamb’s espionage work doesn’t make for an engaging B-plot.

Lamb to the slaughter

Christie amusingly comments on espionage (and anti-espionage) jobs, though. Earlier in her career – as far back as her second book, “The Secret Adversary” — she took this stuff at face value. At times, Christie tried to be a proto-Ian Fleming, but she was never as good at spycraft plots as murder mysteries.

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In “The Clocks,” she flat-out makes fun of the profession in a way that would make Philip K. Dick proud. Lamb, who narrates his own point-of-view chapters, talks to his handler in chapter 20:

“The trouble is,” I said, “that we get to thinking that everything that everybody does is highly suspicious.”

“You may have got something there,” said Colonel Beck. “There are times when I suspect you, Colin, of having changed over to the other side. There are times when I suspect myself of changing over to the other side, and then having changed back again to this one! All a jolly mix-up.”

Descriptive passages

Christie is playful and breezy throughout “The Clocks,” in multiple ways. She gives a delightful description of a used bookstore where the books have taken over. I remember a shop exactly like this in my hometown of Fargo, N.D., in the 1990s.

Meanwhile, in the house next door to the murder scene, cats have taken over. Christie anthropomorphizes these felines similar to how she personalizes the dog in “Dumb Witness.”

Lamb is the son of Poirot’s old friend Superintendent Battle, who features in Christie’s stronger spy-murder mashups of the 1920s – “The Secret of Chimneys” and “The Seven Dials Mystery.” When Lamb goes to consult Poirot, the Belgian sleuth waxes for several pages about mystery novelists through the decades. His references range from real (Arthur Conan Doyle) to fictional (his own friend Ariadne Oliver, who in some ways is Christie’s stand-in).

It’s a neat essay-within-a-novel from Christie. There’s not much of a thematic point, except that Poirot notes that fictional murders are not like real murders. So if a real murder does have the air of fiction, take it as a clue. It’s not merely Christie embarking on convoluted meta commentary.

Via Poirot, Christie reminds us that seemingly complex mysteries are simple at their core; and she also reminds us to not take anyone’s statement as a fact. Information is only a fact if it’s confirmed.

View to a kill? (Spoilers)

(SPOILERS FOLLOW.)

In another winking commentary, the inspectors – Lamb is joined by police sleuth Dick Hardcastle (great name!) — lament that the era of elderly ladies sitting by their windows observing a neighborhood’s activities has passed.

Miss Marple isn’t present in “The Clocks” – the events take place in a coastal town called Crowdean – so instead we get a 10-year-old girl playing at “Rear Window,” the film from the previous decade wherein an injured Jimmy Stewart observes a crime. Christie suddenly introduces a high-rise building across the street from the nice middle-class development where the murder scene (and suspects and witnesses) is located.

This girl is an extremely unlikely character, and it’s also unlikely (although 1963 was a different time) that Lamb could walk right into her apartment and talk to her without proffering his official status. Still, I almost forgive the sequence because it’s entertaining, and it does give Lamb the break in the case.

Throw in a romance between Lamb and the young woman who initially finds the body, and there are a lot of little things to like in “The Clocks.” It’s not Christie’s tightest or most balanced novel. A day after finishing it, I don’t remember the spy plot’s solution.

But the A-plot’s solution is what Poirot promises: simpler than it might seem. And therefore it’s brilliant, as Christie again tricks me even as she explains how the trick is done. As a light refresher course on mystery-solving principles, “The Clocks” is worth your time.

Every week, Sleuthing Sunday reviews an Agatha Christie book or adaptation. Click here to visit our Agatha Christie Zone.