Friday Face Off: clocks

The Friday Face-Off was originally created by Books by Proxy:
each Friday, bloggers showcase book covers on a weekly theme.
Visit Lynn’s Books (@LynnsBooks) for a list of upcoming themes.
Please visit also Tammy at Books, Bones & Buffy (@tammy_sparks)
thanks to whom I discovered this meme.

This week, the theme is
“Rage against the machine – anything, cogs, clockwork, AI“

I’ve gone simple with Clocks, and featuring here one of Agatha Christie’s novels:

The Clocks was published in 1963. I listened to it when I did my project of listening to all of Hercule Poirot. This is #30 in the series.

It’s great at the beginning, then I found it a bit slow. The plot was much more complex than it looked, despise what Hercule Poirot said.
The neat thing is the reference Agatha Christie makes to many authors of crime fiction – in Chapter 14.
There’s also a cool description of how books can take over your place or your world!

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“Sheila Webb, typist-for-hire, has arrived at 19 Wilbraham Crescent in the seaside town of Crowdean to accept a new job. What she finds is a well-dressed corpse surrounded by five clocks. Mrs. Pebmarsh, the blind owner of No. 19, denies all knowledge of ringing Sheila’s secretarial agency and asking for her by name — yet someone did. Nor does she own that many clocks. And neither woman seems to know the victim.
Colin Lamb, a young intelligence specialist working a case of his own at the nearby naval yard, happens to be on the scene at the time of Sheila Webb’s ghastly discovery. Lamb knows of only one man who can properly investigate a crime as bizarre and baffling as what happened inside No. 19 — his friend and mentor, Hercule Poirot. “

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Click on the picture below if you want to identify the various editions
You can also right click and ‘open image in new tab’ to zoom in

My favorite cover is the Dutch edition, for its cleverness. Funny that no other illustrator thought of that! Too bad it’s not more artistically done.

Have you read this book?
WHICH COVER IS YOUR FAVORITE? WHY?
My next participation may be on Friday, September 23:
“Tough Travel Tropes – Coming of Age”

19 thoughts on “Friday Face Off: clocks”

Gosh, you’ve cracked this challenge. Off hand I can only think of David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks.

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WordsAndPeace on September 16, 2022 at 8:12 am said:

I was familiar with the book cover for The Bone Clocks, but have not read it. The synopsis makes it sound really intense. Did you like it?

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- margaret21 on September 16, 2022 at 8:19 am said:
  
  Erm. It’s on my bookshelf. Unread 😦
  
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  - WordsAndPeace on September 16, 2022 at 8:20 am said:
    
    Let us know, if you get to it one day
    
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    - margaret21 on September 16, 2022 at 8:24 am said:
      
      I’ve a feeling it’s a book that’s always going to drift to the bottom of my particular pile. In fact I probably should junk it … in your direction?
      
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    - WordsAndPeace on September 16, 2022 at 8:29 am said:
      
      At this point personally, I would probably not read it, but that’s just me. And mostly because of the horror/paranormal elements.
      By him, I listened to The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I have a few thoughts about it here: https://wordsandpeace.com/2010/10/02/read-in-june-september/.
      But the genre sounds very different here
      
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    - margaret21 on September 18, 2022 at 2:33 am said:
      
      Thanks for the link to the David Mitchell. It does indeed look an interesting read.
      
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    - WordsAndPeace on September 18, 2022 at 10:11 pm said:
      
      It is, but requires a good time investment
      
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I like the Italian cover (4th one) although many of these are good covers. I couldn’t find a book this week so I didn’t put a post up, but next week should be easy!

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WordsAndPeace on September 16, 2022 at 8:10 am said:

Yes, the 4th has a good ambiance with that color

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Great selection! I’m rather fond of the old Fontana edition – lots of my Christies are from that series!

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WordsAndPeace on September 16, 2022 at 2:54 pm said:

Ah yes, that’s different when you have them on your shelf

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I have not read this. I like all the covers but the Spanish cover is very eye catching

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WordsAndPeace on September 17, 2022 at 4:58 pm said:

As I said, it’s not my favorite, but chap 14 was great fun with all these references

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