Clocks in Books

So a chap comes into a room with a dead body in it.

[He] saw the room full of clocks… He looked up once more at the clock that had stopped. It was a very old clock, or a good imitation of an old one… He glanced round at the rest of the clocks. There were two tall grandfathers, each in a corner of the room. There was a frivolous arrangement of cupids under a glass bell. There was a curious clock with only one hand that seemed to require a trickle of water to keep it going. There were all kinds of other clocks, including a brisk little modern one...

We all know which British crime mystery that is, don’t we?

But we’d be wrong. That description is from Elizabeth Ferrars’ book The Lying Voices, which came out in 1954. I imagine most crime fan readers here would have assigned it to Agatha Christie’s The Clocks – which appeared a good 9 years later in 1963. Nobody seems to have commented on this: it’s a very unusual setup to have appeared twice, but I guess just coincidence.

And then, interestingly, the Ferrars book shares a key plot element with another much more famous book: I can’t say which without spoilering the solution, so will just say that it was another female author, and was published in 1950.

I would say that book is the best by that author, the one I’m not going to name. But, sticking with Ferrars and Christie - it wasn’t the finest moment for either of them.

There’s a moment early on where the hero/amateur sleuth Justin says

‘Liars,’ Justin muttered explosively. ‘Liars, every one of them.’

-he’s talking about the pesky clocks, saying they can’t conclude anything about the time of death from them, and it’s quite a (clock-) striking moment, which gave Ferrars her title – but it’s downhill from there.

We are thrown into a set of people, almost as if we should know them already, as if it were part of a series or soap opera.  Nothing is explained, and they are not interesting enough to make it worthwhile to make the effort, and the people are not distinct  enough. Though she does try with this clothes detail:

[He] saw a girl in a scarlet coat descend from a bus. But for the sunshine falling on the brave red coat and on her bright, fair hair, he might not have noticed her…However, for a moment, as she reached the pavement, she stood in his way, facing him, and he received a vivid impression, that he later remembered clearly, of her sunlit youth and beauty.

Ferrars sends a not-very-interesting hero, to visit an old friend, and while he is there a friend of hers is murdered. There is an implication that he has some kind of standing in the case, though not clear why – ex-spy? We never do find out. But he does some investigating. There is a lot of wondering which of the clocks showed the right time, and there are various lines of thought that go nowhere. There was a detail about general housekeeping regarding fires - completely new to me and I imagine would be unknown to most people in this day and age.

It is always good to have a glimpse of life in the 1950s – here, Justin is staying in a hotel and there is this  awful but wholly believable detail:

Suddenly he realised that he was cold. There was an electric fire in the room, but the meter needed a shilling before he could switch it on. Feeling through his pockets, he found that he did not possess a single one. At that point, he decided to go out, acquire a supply of shillings and buy a newspaper.

There is another clothes moment that I enjoyed:

 

A dress of an indeterminate grey-green colour, of some flimsy material, which here and there let through the glow of the firelight from the room behind her, helped to make her seem insubstantial and almost ghost-like. But her eyes were brilliant and alive. There were no signs that she had been crying… shot with a metallic thread, the dress was a beautiful one, but strangely sumptuous for a woman who, according to her own story, had come in from marketing to cook the supper for herself and her husband.

In Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver World (subject of much blog fascination) I have recently added another question to my Patent Checklist: How Many People were in the beach hut/summer house/ graveyard around the time of the murder? She is the queen of this, with the reader wondering how come they didn’t all trip over each other as they sneak around, but Ferrars does well here with a number of people visiting the victim on the day of his death, carefully watched by an old man in a nearby house. Obviously someone is lying, but which of them?

But fair enough, the author comments on this:

‘That means then,’ he said with heavy sarcasm, ‘that besides Eagan, the woman in red, the hypothetical woman in brown and yourself, still another person went to the Thaines’ house yesterday afternoon and let the dog in before Hester Thaine got back from Wallport.’

You get the feeling she was losing interest in her own plot. The hero says this

Justin found that he was beginning to dislike Brillhart’s unfinished sentences. They managed to suggest too many things.

and it’s that kind of book, everything is just trailing off.

I agreed with him, Justin, because I had just highlighted this wholly unsatisfactory exchange which I felt was meaningless:

‘That’s partly why I like her so much, even though she doesn’t like me. I’m hoping she’ll get over that some day—perhaps if she realises that it’s not so terrible if I know her secret. What d’you think? Has she said anything about it?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Justin said. ‘I don’t know of any secret of hers and I don’t know why she should try to keep an eye on Mrs Thaine.’

‘Don’t you? Don’t you really? Oh well, if that’s so . . .’ Brillhart looked as if this had given him something new to think about.

 I just couldn’t get too worked up about any of it, they all seemed uninteresting and not very nice people. Building your mystery on a series of varied stories any of which could be the lies – well, it’s not much of a plot is it? That said, I didn’t guess the real story at all, it was cleverly done. But, meanly, I’m not surprised no-one remembers it enough to compare it with either of the two books it resembles. 

The Christie Clocks will be featuring on the blog soon as part of my Christie Catchup.

Clock picture from Flickr Commons.