The Clocks

The Collins Crime Club issued The Clocks on 7 November 1963, and Dodd, Mead brought it out in the United States the year after. The British edition sold for sixteen shillings and the American one for four dollars and fifty cents.

Poirot is set a challenge in it: to prove that a crime could be solved from an armchair, without going near the place where it happened or speaking to anybody involved. He accordingly works from a distance while the police do the walking, and the novel is in part a demonstration of whether he can bring the case off that way.

Two plots run alongside each other. One is the murder Poirot is examining at a distance, and the other is a story of Cold War espionage told in the first person, which brings back a narrative method Christie had mostly given up in the Poirot sequence. The book is one of the later novels of a long career, and its puzzle depends on the times on a set of clocks found in a room with a body in it.