The Clocks

‘From real life I turned to fiction. You see me here with various examples of criminal fiction at my right hand and my left. I have been working backwards. Here-’ he picked up the volume that he had laid on the arm of his chair when I entered, ‘-here, my dear Colin, isThe Leavenworth Case.’ He handed the book to me.

‘That’s going back quite a long time,’ I said. ‘I believe my father mentioned that he read it as a boy. I believe I once read it myself. It must seem rather old-fashioned now.’

‘It is admirable,’ said Poirot. ‘One savours its period atmosphere, its studied and deliberate melodrama. Those rich and lavish descriptions of the golden beauty of Eleanor, the moonlight beauty of Mary!’

‘I must read it again,’ I said. ‘I’d forgotten the parts about the beautiful girls.’ 

‘And there is the maid-servant, Hannah, so true to type, and the murderer, an excellent psychological study.’

I perceived that I had let myself in for a lecture. I composed myself to listen.

‘Then we will take theAdventures of Arsene Lupin,’ Poirot went on. ‘How fantastic, how unreal. And yet what vitality there is in them, what vigour, what life! They are preposterous, but they have panache. There is humour, too.’

He laid down theAdventures of Arsene Lupin and picked up another book. ‘And there isThe Mystery of the Yellow Room. That-ah, that is really aclassic! I approve of it from start to finish. Such a logical approach! There were criticisms of it, I remember, which said that it was unfair. But it is not unfair, my dear Colin. No, no. Very nearly so, perhaps, but not quite. There is the hair’s breadth of difference. No. All through there is truth, concealed with a careful and cunning use of words. Everything should be clear at that supreme moment when the men meet at the angle of three corridors.’ He laid it down reverently. ‘Definitely a masterpiece, and, I gather, almost forgotten nowadays.’

Poirot skipped twenty years or so, to approach the works of somewhat later authors.

‘I have read also,’ he said, ‘some of the early works of Mrs Ariadne Oliver. She is by way of being a friend of mine, and of yours, I think. I do not wholly approve of her works, mind you. The happenings in them are highly improbable. The long arm of coincidence is far too freely employed. And, being young at the time, she was foolish enough to make her detective a Finn, and it is clear that she knows nothing about Finns or Finland except possibly the works of Sibelius. Still, she has an original habit of mind, she makes an occasional shrewd deduction, and of later years she has learnt a good deal about things which she did not know before. Police procedure for instance. She is also now a little more reliable on the subject of firearms. What was even more needed, she has possibly acquired a solicitor or a barrister friend who has put her right on certain points of the law.’

He laid aside Mrs Ariadne Oliver and picked up another book.

‘Now here is Mr Cyril Quain. Ah, he is a master, Mr Quain, of the alibi.’

‘He’s a deadly dull writer if I remember rightly,’ I said.

‘It is true,’ said Poirot, ‘that nothing particularly thrilling happens in his books. There is a corpse, of course. Occasionally more than one. But the whole point is always the alibi, the railway time-table, the bus routes, the plans of the cross-country roads. I confess I enjoy this intricate, this elaborate use of the alibi. I enjoy trying to catch Mr Cyril Quain out.’ 

‘And I suppose you always succeed,’ I said.

Poirot was honest.

‘Not always,’ he admitted. ‘No, not always. Of course, after a time one realizes that one book of his is almost exactly like another. The alibis resemble each other every time, even though they are not exactly the same. You know,mon cher Colin, I imagine this Cyril Quain sitting in his room, smoking his pipe as he is represented to do in his photographs, sitting there with around him the A.B.C.s, the continental Bradshaws, the airline brochures, the time-tables of every kind. Even the movements of liners. Say what you will, Colin, there is order and method in Mr Cyril Quain.’

He laid Mr Quain down and picked up another book.

‘Now here is Mr Garry Gregson, a prodigious writer of thrillers. He has written at least sixty-four, I understand. He is almost the exact opposite of Mr Quain. In Mr Quain’s books nothing much happens, in Garry Gregson’s far too many things happen. They happen implausibly and in mass confusion. They are all highly coloured. It is melodrama stirred up with a stick. Bloodshed-bodies-clues-thrills piled up and bulging over. All lurid, all very unlike life. He is not quite, as you would say, my cup of tea. He is, in fact, not a cup of tea at all. He is more like one of these American cocktails of the more obscure kind, whose ingredients are highly suspect.’