Subpar Poirot?! A Review of "The Clocks"

This one gives me some serious mixed feelings. I've read a decent number of Agatha Christie's Poirot novels, and they are invariably excellent. Until today.

I was wandering around a physical, public library one day last month and the most interesting thing I found on their shelves was a copy of The Clocks, supposedly a Hercule Poirot mystery, by Agatha Christie of course. I managed to read a good chunk of it before my friends arrived, and I decided to come back and finish it this weekend.

It's way below average for a Poirot story. I'd even hesitate to call it a Poirot story because he's barely in it, and he's a little off-standard, too, yammering at length about American and British mystery writers and reciting stanzas from Alice in Wonderland and strange British nursery rhymes.

Instead of Poirot, for most of the story we get two different protagonists. Colin Lamb is an energetic, curious, romantic young man who has a secret that I'll leave to the spoiler section of the video. Detective Inspector Hardcastle is an older, more sedate, thorough-minded and dutiful inspector with some great humanizing moments in the story.

Christie writes both of them well, and the murder mystery itself is still pretty decent if you compare it to the whole genre, but for a Poirot book this is way below what I expected.

The mystery is a double mystery, with some international intrigue included (I still don't know why Christie kept hammering on this idea, see my review of Destination Unknown), and a huge tidal wave of red herrings and lying witnesses.

But Poirot, and his charming behaviors that we expect, are barely present. He probably shows up in fewer than twenty pages of the whole book, and is treated more like a vending machine than a real detective.

The mystery progresses in fits and starts to a fairly jumbled ending. It's a decent read but not what I was expecting. Christie's writing is solid and competent, of course, and the mystery is built in an intriguing way, but it almost breaks a major rule of murder mystery and the double mystery structure, while creative, muddles things more than it makes them fun.

Read it for free here.

Or grab a copy, if you want, here.

As usual, see the embedded video for the Spoiler Section, starting at 11:24.