Poirot Retrospective #24: The Clocks

Poirot Retrospective #24: The Clocks

 A bad Poirot! Oh no!

Actually, you can only technically call this a Poirot novel, because he's barely in this. There are two main protagonists - the insufferable Colin Lamb, who is also a cold war spy, and Inspector Hardcastle, another in a long line of competent, not-as-dull-as-they-seem police detectives. Poirot occupies maybe 1% of the book, at best. 

The plot is a sloppy mess, a combination of cold war spy drama (and I've already noted how emphatically *poor* Christie is with these spy narratives - this is no better) and a traditional "strange set-up" murder: a stenographer is hired for a blind woman, she arrives at the house only to find a dead man in a room where four stopped clocks all read 4:13. 

Although the clues necessary to solve this one are theoretically available, I really struggled with this because they are deliberately obfuscated, and because I simply didn't much care for the central mystery. It's not very compelling. 

This is clearly a later Christie, taking place in the early 60s, with some occasional observations on class differences in post-War England, but they are rather dull and predictable compared to other novels. 

The biggest disappointment is, of course, poor Poirot, who is resigned to a tiny role as a consultant and enters the story only to correct the dullard spy Colin Lamb and the smarter but no more successful policeman. 

The solution to the murder mystery is not particularly satisfying, although I suppose it's plausible. The solution to the spy drama is ludicrous... and, what's worse, Christie tosses in some absolutely impossible plot twists in the final pages that detract heavily from the book rather than enrich it. 

I did a little digging, and found that Christie had misgivings about this one after it was published, and confessed to her editor that she wished she could "spruce it up a bit." 

As a Poirot, it's very poor. As a general mystery novel it's not a lot better. After this, I think I have about nine or ten Poirot novels left, all of them considered fairly minor ones. The most prominent is Three Act Tragedy or maybe Mrs McGinty's Dead.