PBS Masterpiece Theater presents Christie’s The Clocks tonight. Originally published in 1963, the novel immediately annoyed me with part of the story told in the third person and part of the story told in the first person. A secretary is summoned to an apartment where she finds a blind woman and a dead body. Four clocks are mysteriously present. And they are set an hour ahead of the actual time. The Clocks reminded me more of an Ellery Queen or John Dickson Carr mystery than a Christie. And when Poirot reveals the key to the puzzle, a mystery writer is at the center of the solution. GRADE: B
They are definitely in second-tier Christies. Not that there’s anything wrong with being complete.
It was one of the earliest Christies I read. We bought it along with the Marple book THE BODY IN THE LIBRARY on our belated honeymoon trip to London in April of 1971. I think we pretty much picked these two out at random (I’d previously read AND THEN THERE WERE NONE).
After getting home we both started reading our way through all the Christies, in no order other than whatever title we could find, starting in November at the beginning with THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES.
I read 17 by the end of 1971 and another 13 in January of 1972, then 13 more that year.
I had everyone of them once. A friend’s grandmother was ill and I loaned them to her. “Oh,” she said six months later when I asked about them. “Did you want them back?”