The Clocks

Last year, I wrote an article on glasses in mystery fiction, looking at the various ways in which spectacles could be used in a mystery plot. I ended the article with a note that "I doubt this post will turn into a series about all kinds of objects (...)" but now one year later, I think it's about time to write about another object often seen in mystery fiction: clocks, watches and other timepieces.

To first quote myself from the glasses article:

Objects are often important to a mystery story. If a murder is committed, the culprit is likely to utilize an object, that is, a murder weapon, to accomplish their goal. A button left at the crime scene could prove as evidence to the identity of the murderer. Or perhaps the disappearance of an object that should be there will become the focus of an investigation, leading the question of why a certain object was so important it had to be removed. An object is thus usually a clue, something that links it to the solution of the mystery (which could be a murder, but it could be any enigmatic happening).  An object might tell you who committed a certain crime, or how it was done, or perhaps why it was done.

Objects and items are usually created with a certain purpose in mind: sometimes it's for decorative purposes, more often it's for more practical needs, and sometimes it's a bit of both. The primary purpose of clocks, wristwatches and similar objects is of course to tell, or measure time. And time is oh-so-important in mystery fiction. When the investigator is looking for the person whodunnit, they always look at means, motive and opportunity, and opportunity is related to time: who was physically capable of committing the crime, being at a certain spot at a certain time? The alibi in mystery fiction is a concept of time: the proof of being present at certain location at a certain time. But also think of locked room mysteries: it's no coincidence that many of the locked room lectures include categorizations/possible solutions that say that the real time the murder occured is either earlier or later than assumed. Time is an integral part of mystery fiction, and you need clocks to tell time.

The first thing you think of when I say clocks in mystery fiction, is probably the image of a damaged wrist or pocket watch, the time stopped at the exact time the time-keeper was broken. The watch of the victim has stopped at 22:00, so he must have been struggling with his murderer then, and broke his watch when he fell on the floor, meaning the murder happened at ten! Of course, no reader of mystery fiction is going to believe this as is. Nowadays, in-universe characters and readers alike are savvy enough to know that the "broken watch" can be easily faked by the murderer to make it seem like the crime was commited at a different time. The notion that clocks indicate the time, but don't actually measure time as independent element is of course the crux of the dilemma. You can measure the outside temperature, and then convert it to different measurement units. Time itself isn't measured by a watch, it does not measure "time" first to convert it to a second/minute/hour scale. A clock just runs at a certain rhythm, allowing us to create a time unit for us to use. So clocks are often used to fake alibis, and often the mystery of course shifts away from "clocks" to "how was the trickery with time" done. That said, clocks can still be an important part of such a mystery story. Let's say a witness saw a certain act happening at a certain time, having checked on their own watch. A trick could be that the murderer managed to changed the time on that watch, making the witness think they saw the act happening then. An excellent example of this idea is Ayukawa Tetsuya's short story Itsutsu no Tokei (The Five Clocks, 1957) where the alibi of a suspect seems iron-clad, as a witness spent the whole evening with the suspect and having checked the time on five different clocks over the course of that evening.

To give another example of clocks fulfilling a role as indicators of time in mystery fiction: the fifth novel in Ayatsuji Yukito's series on Houses is about the Clock House, which includes a wing with a collection of 108 watches. A group of people is locked inside this wing and of course murders happen. Considering the setting of the Clock House, you can safely guess that time has something to do with how the murders were committed, but the trick done here is brilliant, in your sight but oh-so-easy to miss. And it makes great use of the notion of clocks as indicators of time. Norizuki Rintarou's short story Shiramitsubushi no Tokei (Leave No Clock Unturned) goes even further: the protagonist of the story finds themselves in a windowless room with 1440 different running clocks, each indicating a different time down to the minute (12:00, 12:01, 12:02 etc.).  Their task: to find the one single clock in the room that is indicating the current time (as they are running!) It seems an impossible task, but Norizuki shows how this puzzle can be solved by pure logic and dedication.

In the above examples, I'm talking about mostly analog clocks, but man, if I were to go into the topic of digital clocks (especially those on security camera footage), I could be here writing all day. I guess that if I were to mention one single example, it'd be Ooyama Seiichirou's Tokeiya Tantei to Download no Alibi, a short story about an alibi of the main suspect being built around the fact he downloaded a certain song that was only available for download for one day, with digital time-stamps and a receipt proving his alibi.

Talking this much about time almost makes you forget that a clock or timepiece is on its own a physical object too. And yep, that also means that you can use a clock in other ways than just read time. A clock can of course be used as a murder weapon for example, though people who have played the videogame Kindaichi Shounen no Jikenbo - Hoshimitou - Kanashimi no Fukushuuki (The Case Files of Young Kindaichi - Stargazing Isle - The Sad Monsters of Revenge, 1998) will know to be careful with this. In this game, you play the murderer and have to avoid making mistakes or Hajime is instantly on your trail and if you choose to kill that one victim by bashing his head in, it's wiser to use the ornamental duck than the clock which will break and indicate the time of death... Grandfather clocks might be easier to crush a victim under. But there are other uses for clocks as physical objects in mystery fiction. In Yokomizo Seishi's Inugamike no Ichizoku (The Inugami Clan, 1951), some people doubt whether the war-injured Sukekiyo is really Sukekiyo, as his face is covered completely in bandages. One of the characters cleverly has Sukekiyo pick up her pocket watch: his fingerprints are preserved nicely on the glass inside the pocket watch. More 'general' uses for watches in mystery fiction are for example watches as personal items: the scene where Sherlock Holmes deduces about the owner of a certain pocket watch is quite famous. But a culprit for example might have dropped their own watch on the crime scene, or broken it there, leaving pieces of glasses on the floor which they must hide (similar to what I mentioned in the glasses article).

More unique uses of a clock as something else but a time indicator are to be found in for example Detective Conan (where Conan's wearing a stun-gun wristwatch which allows him to shoot a small needle with a strong sedative to knock someone out) or in Death Note, where a watch is revealed to be hiding a certain other object in one of the better known scenes of the series. In these instances, the watch is a disguise for something else. Clocks featured in some Christie novels like, obviously, The Clocks and The Seven Dials Mystery, but I thought they were more props there than actually related to the core plot.

One of the more memorable uses of a clock in mystery fiction is probably the clock as a location. Edogawa Rampo's Yuureitou (The Phantom Tower, 1937) was based on Kuroiwa Ruikou's same-titled Yuureitou (1899-1900), in turn based on A Woman in Grey, a 1898 novel by Alice Muriel Williamson. Part of Rampo's story is set in a creepy clock tower with secret passages etc. This would later inspire a young Miyazaki Hayao (of Studio Ghibli fame) to have the climax of his first animated theatrical feature, Lupin III: The Castle of Caglistro (1979) also set at a clock tower. His climax scene also formed an inspiration for the final scene in Disney's 1989 animated feature The Great Mouse Detective (and in turn also the climax in the Batman: The Animated Series episode The Clock King). While a location might not always be directly connected with the core mystery plot, the clock tower as a setting for a treasure hunt-type story works quite well in my mind.

Anyway, I have written more than enough about clocks in mystery fiction today. I didn't really think too much about the topic, so it's not really going in-depth on all the ways clocks could be used in mystery fiction, but the article should work as an introduction to the topic. My glasses article was more interesting, I personally think, so take a look at that time if you hadn't yet. Anyway, always happy to hear about the examples you might think of regarding the theme of clocks in mystery fiction.