Volume 64 in the Agatha Christie Collection (1963) Limited edition of 1000 copies worldwide As instructed, stenographer Sheila Webb let herself into the house at 19 Wilbraham Crescent. It was then that she made a grisly discovery: the body of a dead man sprawled across the living room floor. What intrigued Poirot about the case was the time factor. Although in a state of shock, Sheila clearly remembered having heard a cuckoo clock strike three o'clock. Yet, the four other clocks in the living room all showed the time as 4.13. Even more strangely, only one of these clocks belonged to the owner of the house...
A great cast of characters and a puzzling crime scene with the mysterious clocks, but Christie decided to give us a rather run-of-the-mill solution on this occasion. Distraction and misdirection are fine techniques in detective fiction, and Christie is usually an expert at applying them, but she decided to misdirect us towards an intriguing solution only to conclude with a fairly obvious murderer and motive in this novel. As a result, the reader is waiting for a clever dénouement that fails to show up at the rendez-vous. If she'd had a change of heart halfway through this novel, it could have been one of her best.
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