Learning by bad example: The Clocks

Agatha Christie is one of my favorite authors, and 10 or so of her 60 books are masterpieces. But as she aged, her writing diminished. The Clocks is an example of a really bad book.

If you want to learn how to pad a novella into a book, this may be the template to use.

Christie weaves two plots together. Colin Lamb (actually the son of Superintendent Battle, although for some reason Christie never comes right out and says this) is a spy catcher, and he is walking along Wilbraham Crescent looking for the address of a possible spy for the Russians. (The 1960s were all the rage for such folk as Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, defecting to Russia and bringing secrets with them).

He's standing outside a house when a girl rushes out screaming - a man is lying dead in the sitting room and she found him.

So we have two mysteries - the spy mystery and the murder mystery. We have two narrators - an omniscient narrator when Detective Inspector Hardcastle is investigating, and Colin Lamb in the first person when he's working on his own case.

Surprisingly, of the 30 or so reviews on Amazon, 15 give it 5 stars, 14, 4 stars. Just goes to show that you can't trust those ratings, the book is abysmal and full of padding. And of course, while coincidences certainly happen in real life, they shouldn't happen in books, and this book has a humongous coincidence...which really leads me to believe that Christie had intended the story to end one way, and then was forced to add another 20,000 words or so and forgot to wind up that plot thread.

I'll go further into this tomorrow.