The Clocks by Agatha Christie

There are some Agatha Christie novels I know word for word, by heart. For nearly all of them, I can give you a pretty good summary of the plot, name all the characters, and discuss key themes and quotes without doing any prep. This isn’t a boast: if anything, it’s a confession of severe social ineptitude and an unhealthy obsession. But, until now, my definite stumbling block has been The Clocks. I just read it for the third time (to give an indication, I’ve probably read And Then There Were None 20+ times).

During the Coronavirus lockdown, it felt like everyone was asking me to recommend Agatha Christies to them. Everyone seems to be reading Christie and/or writing a novel – both of these are very good things, and I’m normally doing one or more of these on a given day, but for the first two weeks of lockdown, I did neither. I wanted absolute distraction for a bit and so read a lot of new-to-me books, mostly from new-to-me authors. In the crime sphere, these included Dennis Wheatley & J.G. Links’ murder dossiers, Magdalen Nabb’s Death of an Englishman, Edward Marston’s The Railway Detective, Vera Casparay’s Laura, Peter Swanson’s Rules for Perfect Murders, and others I can’t remember off the cuff, and a load of non-crime stuff. It mostly hit the spot but not quite and I realised that to truly escape I needed the master.

So, I looked at my bookshelf and picked the one Christie I can’t really remember. All I could remember from having read it at 13 and again at 18 was that it was a bit boring, the plot didn’t tie up, there was a really silly visual clue, and the narrator was a spy pretending to be a marine biologist. But, I reasoned: come on, I’m the one person alive who likes Christie’s generally-acknowledged worst novels, Passenger to Frankfurt and The Big Four.  And even people who hate those books always acknowledge that Christie at her worst is better than most writers on a good day. I also figured that this couldn't be as bad as I remembered, because Christie wrote it before some of her strongest work including At Bertram's Hotel (1965), Endless Night (1967), and Hallowe'en Party (1969) - which means she can't have lost her marbles at this point. So, with some trepidation, I pulled out The Clocks and gave it a whirl.

And – I loved it. God knows what was wrong with me before but now I think it’s brilliant. Not her best, no, but miles better than so many other crime novels. The Clocks, published in 1963, is an interesting departure from the whodunit formula. Then again, most late Christie departs from the Golden Age format. If you’ve heard or read my academic work, you’ll know that I think she reinvented the genre throughout the 1960s. It’s a mystery novel combining the spy thriller format, the self-referential detective narrative, and a small-c conservative comedy of social change.

Sheila Webb, a bang-average stenographer, receives a command to visit a house on Wilbraham Crescent, which is owned by the elderly Millicent Pebmarsh. She arrives at the allotted hour and, because Miss Pebmarsh is blind and not at home, lets herself in. In the room, she finds a strange scene: seven clocks, with five of them displaying the wrong time, and a dead man. She screams and runs out into the street, and into the arms of our narrator, who calls himself Colin Lamb.

Colin is – although he scrupulously never tells anyone, not even us his readers – a spy. He’s also the son of a senior policeman, and I’m not sure if this is Superintendent Spence or Superintendent Battle from the Christie back-catalogue. He was looking for another house on the same road where he believes a communist agent is hiding out. And because Sheila is very pretty he decides to solve this murder on the side.

It’s fourteen chapters before Hercule Poirot gets involved, very much in the background. Perhaps this is evidence that Christie was growing tired of Poirot as is commonly supposed. But I wonder if it actually represents Christie’s negotiation of a trope from spy fiction: the all-seeing deus-ex-machina, the M figure, who swoops in and sorts it out.

If so, Poirot’s presentation this time is a masterstroke. He’s mostly squirreled away in Whitehaven Mansions, but when he talks it’s in full Golden Age manner: he quotes childish riddles in lieu of actually explaining things and he’s going through a phase of reading all around the crime genre. So, he sees everything – including this murder plot – through the eyes of fictional detectives (the creations of real authors like John Dickson Carr, Anna Katherine Greene, and A.A. Milne and of authors like Ariadne Oliver and Gary Gregson, who exist only in the Christieverse).

The solution to the crime utterly bamboozled me and I could not be happier because I thought that feeling of getting hoodwinked by Christie was lost forever. It’s a brilliant blend of intricacy and extreme simplicity. I do remember hearing from other readers that the relevance of the clocks fizzles out but I don’t think that’s true. Their relevance is simply not what we expect it to be. And there’s a really nice twist at the end.

Thematically, the novel is ahead of its time in its treatment of disability. My friend Tina Hodgkinson gave an excellent paper on ableism in The Clocks at last year’s Agatha Christie conference, and I’d like to thank her for drawing our attention to this important theme.

Another key theme in the book is change: most of the characters, especially the unsympathetic ones, are afraid of change. They talk of atomic bombs, the EEC, and supermarkets with equal disdain. And they tie themselves up in knots trying to explain what they mean. Nobody challenged nostalgia while fuelling it with quite such brilliance as Agatha Christie.

If you want some fun, absorbing lockdown reading, you can’t go wrong with Agatha Christie. And I recommend The Clocks without hesitation.

Mini Reviews #16

Each of these texts is one I wanted to devote a whole post to, but, unfortunately, time and energy are not on my side.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963) by Ian Fleming. Probably the most palatable of the James Bond novels, but that's not saying much. The second in the Blofield trilogy, this has some genuinely exciting moments and excellent location-building but the whole vibe of these books is something I can't get behind.

The Secret History (1992) by Donna Tartt. Iconic as an inverted mystery story and as a campus novel, I think it's impossible to deny that The Secret History is a masterpiece.

'Old Boys, Old Girls' (2004) by Edward P. Jones. A short story published in The New Yorker, this is everything twenty-first century crime fiction should be. Powerful and evocative, it voices a perspective that mainstream - white - American fiction cannot emulate.

Gaudy Bauble (2017) by Isabel Waidner. I am obsessed with this avant-garde queer crime novella, published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe. Nothing is defined in Socialist Britain in the year 201x: people, objects, events, and language all merge and blend and interact. In its extraordinary humour, the text reveals how far identity politics and crime fiction have yet to come.

Six Degrees of Assassination (2017) by M.J. Arlidge. This is a six-part political crime drama with an all-star cast, available for free on Audible. Arlidge's script is cliche-ridden but slick enough. The performances suffer from Extremely-Talented-Actors-Reading-A-Script-For-The-First-Time Syndrome.

Mini reviews #13

Gas Light (1938) by Patrick Hamilton. Describing itself as 'a Victorian thriller', Gas Light inspired the hugely successful Hitchcock film (which, amazingly, I haven't seen) and gave birth to the term 'gaslighting'. Until I read it, I didn't realise that the author also wrote the homoerotic psychological classic Rope. The play tells the extremely melodramatic story of a housebound wife in foggy London, who comes to believe that her husband is trying to drive her mad. The play is a hugely important precursor to the modern psychological thriller. However, even for a drama written 80 years ago, it feels slightly archaic in places; good, but more important than good.

Epitaph for a Spy (1938) by Eric Ambler. I'm incredibly impressed by my first taste of Eric Ambler. This early spy thriller, which is more of a detective story than later examples of the genre, stars a rather wonderful Hungarian immigrant, Josef Vadassy, who, taking his holiday snaps to be developed, discovers images of secret codes and weapons. Working with, but not really with, the French police, he stays in an hotel, knowing only that the enemy agent is among the other guests. The prose is fast-paced, funny, and, at times, beautiful. Although the culprit is fairly easy to spot, the denouement, on the rooftops of Toulon, is gripping.

Roseanna (1965) by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. The first in the series from the couple who invented Nordic Noir. A beautiful American tourist winds up dead in Sweden (true life inspiration: Sjöwall observed Wahlöö eyeing up just such a woman, and resolved to kill her off in Chapter One). Out of their depth, the local police call in the troubled Martin Beck and his murder squad. Beck enters an intense and uncomfortable international investigation, uncovering sex crimes, persecution, and betrayal. A bleak and uncompromising story, Roseanna is a pioneering novel that has influenced most western crime writers since. Essential reading, still fresh and powerful today.

The Twelve Deaths of Christmas (1979) by Marian Babson. Last month, I was sorry to hear of Marian Babson's death in December, and reminded of the only book of hers I've read: the ridiculously titled The Twelve Deaths of Christmas. It's a diverting enough murder mystery, nothing more and nothing less. Set around an 'old-fashioned Christmas', the narrative perspective alternates rapidly and it's difficult to spot the killer. I haven't read it since I was eleven, but I remember very vividly a death scene on the London Underground. Babson herself was quite a character, who loved cats and never owned a television; if you have access to the CWA's Red Herrings, check out the tributes in the latest issue.

Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (2003) by Andrew Wilson. Highsmith is the undisputed Queen of Suspense, an author we all want to know more about. Thankfully, Andrew Wilson's biography provides a detailed and nuanced account of her life and work. After reading this biography, I felt like I wanted to call Highsmith 'Pat', like I knew her in all her grubby, contradictory glory. It's not a happy story, but it's as compelling as anything she wrote.

A Toast to Tomorrow by Manning Coles

Today’s blog post is a bit of a departure, as I dip an amateur toe into the pool of spy fiction. Generally, I’m not a discerning critic: I can’t stand Ian Fleming, never got into Eric Ambler (but plan to have another go soon… watch this space), and unapologetically enjoy Agatha Christie’s contributions to the genre. This post covers one of the seminal texts in the emergence of the spy thriller as a distinctly British genre.

‘Manning Coles’ was a pseudonym for two writers, Adelaide (AKO) Manning (1891-1959) and Cyril Coles (1899-1965). They were friends and neighbours, and much of their writing is based on Cyril Coles’ experience in the British secret service. Their first novel featuring the British teacher and con man turned secret agent, Tommy Hambledon, was A Drink to Yesterday, published in 1940. Like Mr Coles, who pretended to be older than he was in order to enlist during the First World War, Hambledon is incredibly patriotic, believing that ‘if a country is worth living in, it’s worth fighting for’, and the Manning Coles novels are interesting because they were started as apparent propaganda during the Second World War, continuing apace — and slowly shedding their realism — into the 1960s, even after the first partner’s death.

A Toast to Tomorrow (1941) is the American title of the second Hambledon novel, which appeared in the UK as Pray Silence. As well as Hambledon and other recurring characters, it contains the then contemporary, and very real, figures of Adolf Hitler among several high-profile fascists. As with most of the books on this blog, I read it because it had been sitting uncaressed on my bookshelf for years. And let's be honest: just looking at the cover, it's clearly about the rise of fascism, which is terrifyingly relevant in this day and age.

The blurb of this one — my edition is the US first — makes it clear that Manning Coles is supposed to be ushering in a new era of spy fiction:

It is as different from the old spy stories as a Hitchcock movie is from silent pictures […] We would like you to forget any ideas you may have about spy stories and approach this as a novel with humor, three-dimensional characters, realistic motivation and breathtaking suspense.

What the blurb doesn’t mention is  the plot, so here it is. We encounter a man in a hospital in Germany in 1918 who has no idea who he is. The nurses name him Hans Lehmann and he starts to wonder what he could possibly have done to lead to such severe memory loss. He is worried that he might have been a murderer — the nurses say he is too nice for this to be true, but he reassures them that ‘some criminals are delightful people.’ They agree, though, that he has probably killed, because he is of military age.

In the next decade or so, Lehmann runs around Germany trying to find his family, and soon encounters a lonely old woman in a small town who is willing to act as a surrogate aunt, without bringing him any closer to his true identity. Scouring military bases, he somehow ends up meeting Hitler and Goebbels, is impressed by their rhetoric, and joins the fledgling Nazi party. He soon rises through the ranks and, in the 1930s, becomes the Nazi chief of police.

While Lehmann conscientiously tows the party line, his ‘aunt’ Ludmilla often puts Hitler and others gently in their places. For instance, when Hitler goes of on one about all the glorious things ‘the Party’ will do when it comes to power, Ludmilla interrupts ‘innocently’ with a question about how they’re going to afford it. Hitler’s attitude to Ludmilla also sews a seed of doubt into Lehmann’s hero-worship, because the leader comes across as a clear misogynist who can’t deviate from the script. After the first family meeting, Klaus and Ludmilla share the most appropriate response to the far-right during peacetime: they ‘looked at each other and burst out laughing.’

Anyway, the Nazis gain power and Lehmann assumes his senior role. Goebbels doesn’t like him, but Hitler does, so he stays in place. In his role, he sends a load of innocent people to concentration camps, and tries not to think about it.  Then he has a revelation: he’s got his memory back, just on the eve of the Second World War.

And guess what? He’s not German at all, but an English government spy called Tommy Hambledon! He later remembers that he was planning to ‘retire to the country and grow pigs’ but such plans are put on hold. Automatically, he switches allegiance and works to undermine the German government from within. This is very carefully explained as perfectly natural. Lehmann/Hambledon has not changed his character at all, the authors assure us, just his allegiance. He’s still intensely patriotic but now, because he’s discovered that he’s English, he’s on the right side. He proceeds to get a bunch of senior Nazis sent to concentration camps which is, I think, supposed to be jolly funny or something. A hundred pages or so are devoted to the various capers surrounding a government going to war, rounding up foreigners, while the head of police is himself a foreign spy.

I find it incredibly telling that Hambledon’s unthinking and violent patriotism is never problematised — the fact that the authors are perfectly happy to make it clear that his allegiance, like our implied judgment of it, is based purely on an accident of birth. When I say Hambledon doesn’t change his character, I mean it: his alarming attitude towards Jewish people remains in place, and the novel takes a weird kind of position of abhorring fascism whilst revelling in anti-semitism. Perhaps this is one of the pitfalls of a war retrospective written when the war was just getting started.

A Toast To Tomorrow is an interesting piece of amateur propaganda, and an intriguing spy thriller. I know that Manning and Coles have been credited with inventing the genre in post-war Britain with its focus on authentic psychological excitement over and above fast-paced codes, ciphers, and women. And I can see how this makes sense in relation to A Toast for Tomorrow. The novel’s flaws are plain for all to see — they’re of their time but not excusable, and the book survives on its own merits as a self-conscious study in allegiance and jingoism.

Mini reviews #4

The Saltmarsh Murders (1931) by Gladys Mitchell. An absolutely delightful, waspish parody of village mysteries, most obviously The Murder at the Vicarage, featuring the captivating Mrs Bradley.

The Labours of Hercules (1947) by Agatha Christie. Hercule Poirot decides to retire with twelve cases, each resembling one of his namesake's labours. These cases prove to be hit-and-miss, but overall an excellent bridge between the carefree early Poirots and the sombre late Poirots. Needless to say, he doesn't retire.

Tim Frazer Again (1964) by Francis Durbridge. The thing I like about Durbridge is his innocence. When he tries to write cynically, with a tough secret agent protagonist, the whole thing falls flat. Tim Frazer is not an impressive creation.

Derailed (2003) by James Siegel. Forgettable, well-plotted and poorly-executed thriller which has, I think, been filmed. Reading it, one gets the impression that the author would rather be writing a treatment for Hollywood. Assuming that all women exist only to annoy men, the twist is quite obvious.

A Talent for Murder (2017) by Andrew Wilson. A thriller in which Agatha Christie herself is blackmailed into a murderous conspiracy. Wilson's page-turner is grounded equally in extensive research and an expansive imagination.