clocks | Words And Peace

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!

📚

“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. “

📚

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”