The Clocks (novel) - Film, TV or Theatrical Adaptations

Film, TV or Theatrical Adaptations

An adaptation for the ITV series Agatha Christie's Poirot, with David Suchet as Poirot, was produced for the show's twelfth season. Guest stars include Tom Burke as Lieutenant Colin Race, Jaime Winstone as Sheila Webb, Anna Massey as Miss Pebmarsh, and Lesley Sharp as Miss Martindale. Charles Palmer (who also directed Hallowe'en Party for the series) directs this instalment, with the screenplay being written by Stewart Harcourt (who also wrote the screenplay for Murder on the Orient Express).

A few changes were made to this version, but, unlike other adaptations for this series, the main plot structure was largely left in place. The plot includes two major threads, neither of which has anything to do with the other. The main thread involves a young secretary named Sheila Webb. She receives word from her employer, Miss Martindale (who runs the Cavendish Secretarial Bureau), that Sheila has been specifically requested at the home of Miss Pebmarsh at 3:00 that day. Sheila is told by Miss Martindale to let herself into Miss Pebmarsh's house if no one is home. Sheila does as she is told and sits in the parlour waiting for her client.

While waiting, she notices that there are five clocks in the room. One is a cuckoo clock that is set to the correct time. The other four clocks are all set to the same, wrong, time, 4:13. We later learn that Sheila is deeply unsettled by this number because it is the room number of a hotel where she is carrying out a meaningless affair with a professor, mostly out of a sense of loneliness. Further jarring Sheila is that one of the four clocks set to 4:13 belongs to her, in fact it is her most personal possession, as it was supposedly given by her mother before she was given up for adoption as a baby. Sheila had lost the clock a few weeks before when she took it to a jeweller to be repaired. Sitting in Miss Pebmarsh's parlour, Sheila then sees the dead man lying on the floor, stabbed. Screaming, she runs out of the house and into the arms of the Colin Lamb figure (now bearing the surname of 'Race' and identified as Colonel Race's son), who happens to be on the street investigating the spy conspiracy that makes up the other main thread in the story. Race and the police investigate, and Sheila becomes the prime suspect, though Race has fallen in love with her and does not believe her to be guilty. The police find the missing clock in Sheila's possession. They assume it means she murdered the unknown man, but really she only took it because of its significance to her and because it might implicate her.

Sheila has a friend at the Cavendish Bureau named Nora. They attend the inquest together, at which many people testified. After the inquest, Nora desperately tries to inform the police about something, saying that someone who testified at the inquest was lying (and indicating this person is a woman). Before Nora can provide further information to the police, she is strangled in a public phone box.

The police have no luck identifying the dead man on Miss Pebmarsh's floor. Finally, a woman comes forward after reading his description in the newspaper and identifies him as her husband, who she has not seen for many years. To perfect the identification, she says he has a scar behind his left ear and this is found to be correct. However, she cannot explain why the police surgeon says it is only a couple of years old, when she has not seen him for much longer.

The police are about to arrest Sheila for the murder when Poirot intervenes (unlike the book, he is present during the entire police investigation). As in the book, Poirot learns that Miss Martindale is actually the sister of Mrs Bland, who lives in great wealth with her husband in a home quite near Miss Pebmarsh. The Blands say that their money came from an inheritance to Mrs Bland from her family in Canada; however, the first Mrs Bland, who died of natural causes, was the real heiress. When they learned that the dead Mrs Bland was due to inherit a lot of money, Mr Bland, the second Mrs Bland and her sister (Miss Martindale) devise a plan for the second Mrs Bland to impersonate her predecessor to inherit the fortune.

The dead man was an acquaintance of the first Mrs Bland; he happened to be travelling in England and wanted to visit her. Realising that he would see through the deception, Mr Bland and Miss Martindale lured him to the Blands' home, drugged his tea and had him delivered to Miss Pebmarsh's house hidden in a laundry delivery van. After getting him into Miss Pebmarsh's living room Mr Bland stabbed him.

Poirot realises that Mr Bland and Miss Martindale sought to establish a crime scene which was bizarre and included so many red herrings that it would confuse and confound the police. First, the dead man is very hard to identify because he is from Canada and has no connection to Dover. Second, he has no connection at all to Miss Pebmarsh, he was simply killed in her parlour to throw the police off. Third, it was set up so Sheila would discover the dead man, since she also had no connection to the dead man or the Blands. And fourth, the elaborate and bizarre ruse of the clocks, which had no real meaning but were intended to be confusing.

In fact, Miss Martindale read about the clocks and some of the other plot points in an unpublished novel by a detective fiction writer for whose estate she still provided secretarial services. In that story, the clocks and other devices were also used to act as red herrings to confuse the police. The only significance of the clocks was to be bizarre and unexplainable, and to distress Sheila with a reminder of her meaningless affair. However, Nora, who broke her shoe and returned from lunch early on the day of the murder, knew for a fact that Miss Martindale did not receive any phone call requesting that Sheila go to Miss Pebmarsh's house that day, as she testified at the inquest. When Nora tried to tell the police that “she” was lying at the inquest, she was referring to Miss Martindale. Overhearing this in the hallway outside the inquest, Miss Martindale took the opportunity to strangle Nora. Finally, the Blands and Miss Martindale hired an actress, Merlina Rival, to pretend to be the dead man's wife. When it became clear that she was falling apart and unable to cope with the police suspicion, Mr Bland lured her to a rendezvous and murdered her, bringing their death toll to three in all.

The second thread involved Miss Pebmarsh and her neighbour, who are caught by Lieutenant Race and Naval Intelligence smuggling secrets out of England for the benefit of Germany. Miss Pebmarsh's motive is that her sons died in World War I and she prefers England to have very weak defences so that any German invasion will succeed quickly and other English boys will not die. Two German neighbours of Miss Pebmarsh, posing as English academics, come under suspicion of being the spies, but they are found to be innocent Jews fleeing persecution. The McNaughtons do not appear.

The role of Miss Pebmarsh was Anna Massey's last before her death, and the ITV broadcast of the episode is dedicated to her memory.