This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarian, Miranda Marraccini.

Happy Horror-ological Halloween! Last year in honor of this spooky season I wrote about watches that kill, uncanny automata, and goblins of Swiss watchmaking. I featured a recent novel called “Death Watch,” in which a watch that might just be capable of severing its wearer’s wrist becomes the “must-have accessory for end-time capitalism.”

This year I’m focusing on other mystery novels and thrillers in our library collection at the Horological Society of New York–which includes fiction! Not long ago, I was given a gift of an Author Clock, which displays the time using different literary quotations for each minute of the day. For instance, a line from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia” that appears on the face of the clock at 3 p.m. reads: “At three o’clock precisely I was at Baker Street, but Holmes had not yet returned.”

Perusing the quotations as the Author Clock cycled through them reminded me that accurate timekeeping is especially important in mystery or crime novels, since witnesses and investigators often need to reconstruct a series of fatal events. For instance, in the Agatha Christie book below, a chapter begins: “To use police terms: at 2:59 P.M on September 9th, I was proceeding along Wilbraham Crescent in a westerly direction.”

Many adults who come into the library ask me fondly if we have mystery classics from their childhood like the first Nancy Drew novel, “The Secret of the Old Clock”–and we do! In the story, Nancy, the intrepid daughter of a criminal defense attorney, tries to do a good deed by finding a missing will whose contents will aid a deserving family. She pursues her investigative aim, and some thieves who get involved later, through a combination of quick thinking and even quicker driving.

To reveal the location of the missing will would not be in the spirit of mystery writing, but suffice it to say it involves a clock of this description: an “old fashioned mantel clock…it had a square face and the top was ornamented with a crescent.” We have a few editions, but our 1950s-era copy has a charming cover (image 1) showing one rendering of the mantel clock. In this version, the clock is lying in tall grass with its dial taken off, but you can see it better in the 1987 edition’s cover (image 2).

The flyleaf inside the 1950s edition contains the signature of one Sandra Hoksch, who received it for Christmas in 1955. Sandra, or one of the book’s later owners, carefully marked every book in the series she had read (image 3). I love to find readers’ marks in books, and I think of the people who wrote in our books like ghosts on the page, reading over our shoulders, waiting for our laugh, our scream of delight or terror. Sandra might not be a literal ghost, and if she sees this, I encourage her to contact us! But either way, her childhood note connects her materially to our 21st-century library and its readers.

At the time of its original publication, the boy-equivalent of Nancy was of course the Hardy Boys. One Hardy Boys mystery in our collection at HSNY is “While the Clock Ticked,” originally published 1932. The climax of the story involves a time bomb attached to a grandfather clock. The scene makes use of the dramatic tension of the “inexorable swinging of the clock’s pendulum as the minutes ticked by.” Our copy, the revised 1962 edition, deploys the clock scene right on the cover (image 4).

Sometimes stopped clocks in mystery novels are evidence of an event happening at a precise time, like someone’s death. In the first few pages of “The Clocks,” by the inimitable Agatha Christie, secretary Sheila Webb is about to discover a dead body: “Sheila started violently as there was a whir and a click above her head, and from a wooden carved clock on the wall a cuckoo sprang out through a little door and announced loudly and definitely: Cuckoo, Cuckoo, Cuckoo! The harsh note seemed almost menacing.” The clock sounds a note of foreboding in the novel’s first few pages.

What’s more mysterious is that the room is filled with “a profusion of clocks–a grandfather…a Dresden china clock…a silver carriage clock…a small fancy gilt clock” and “a faded leather travelling clock, with ROSEMARY in worn gilt letters across the corner.” All these clocks are stopped at 4:13, and what’s even MORE baffling is that the home’s owner denies that the clocks, except for the cuckoo clock, are hers. Why are there so many clocks? And why are they all showing the same time? And by the way, who is the dead man in a pool of blood behind the sofa?

In this mystery, detective Hercule Poirot tries to find out what is going on from the comfort of his armchair, while other investigators do the actual work of investigating. (To be fair, he takes this relaxed approach as a result of a challenge from another character.)

The cover art on our copy (image 5) takes advantage of the cuckoo clock’s “menacing” call by portraying it with a cuckoo bird in the form of a skull. The illustration references not only the death in the story, but the historical memento mori shapes of watches over time, including skulls. Images 6 and 7, from the book “500 Years, 100 Watches,” show a skull watch made by Jean Rousseau around 1650. Its movement is crammed into the “cranial cavity,” as the text puts it, while opening its toothy grin reveals the dial between its jaws. A 400-year-old watch with a movement for a brain that speaks the time out of its dead metal mouth. It might remind you of the inevitability of death, and it definitely knows when you’re going to die.

For a more recent mystery read, why not try “Just Killing Time,” by Julianne Holmes, the first in a clock-themed series? How could you resist with this blurb on the back cover: “Ruth Clagan may be an expert clockmaker, but she has always had a tendency to lose track of time. And when trying to solve a murder, every second counts…”

Ruth returns home after her grandfather’s death. He ran a small-town New England clock shop, the Cog & Sprocket, before being killed in an apparent robbery. Now Ruth must reconstruct what happened to him while settling into her new role as heir to the shop. Luckily, she’s a horologist and clockmaker herself, so she’s “comforted and inspired” by the cluttered shop, with its “clock guts everywhere” and “smell that combined lemon oil, dust, mothballs and motor grease.” And she has a sassy shop cat, Bezel, to aid her investigations.

If you’re hooked already, we’ve just added two sequels to our library, titled “Clock and Dagger” and “Chime and Punishment.” As you may have guessed from the titles, horological puns are a delightfully heavy component of Holmes’ writing: Ruth is “wound up”; she won’t stop until the killer is “serving time”; she’ll have to kick into “high gear” to solve the case. You can see all three books in the series in image 8; importantly for cat people like me, all of the covers feature a cat amongst the steampunk-esque gears and tools.

Not every crime is a murder, of course. I’ll leave you with the infamous tale of the Queen, the real horological heist that plays a part in the Allen Kurzweil novel “The Grand Complication.” This 2016 Forbes piece about the watch’s story begins “It seems like something out of a Sherlock Holmes novel…” That couldn’t be more accurate.

Celebrated horologist Abraham-Louis Breguet created the watch, called No. 160, for Marie Antoinette in 1783, but it wasn’t finished for 44 years after its initial commission. With 23 complications, made mostly of gold and covered in jewels, it was an extraordinarily expensive watch of extraordinary ingenuity. It passed through the collection of David Salomons before ending up in the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic Art in Jerusalem, whence it was stolen by an expert jewel thief in 1983, along with over 100 other rare timepieces.

That’s where the story stood when Kurzweil published “The Grand Complication” in 2001. The Queen, along with dozens of other pieces, was missing, a legendary work of art visible only in images and records. In the novel, a private collector hires Alexander Short, “a stylish young reference librarian of arcane interests” to find a missing object that turns out to be…you guessed it. Horology may be the least arcane thing in this novel, which also includes “quirky colleagues, erotic pop-ups, deviant passions, and miraculous examples of theft,” according to the publisher.

I enjoyed the book’s horological easter eggs, among them a tiny escape wheel illustration that appears between sections of text that is a rendering of one within the movement of the watch in question. As you flip through the book, the wheel turns.

In real life, Swatch group CEO Nicolas G. Hayek commissioned a period-perfect working replica of the famous timepiece in 2005, and right around the time that replica was finished a few years later, the stolen original resurfaced. That complicated story is one told in John Biggs’ nonfiction work “Marie Antoinette's Watch: Adultery, Larceny and Perpetual Motion.” This book is the only one in this article to contain crime scene photos (image 9), for the true crime aficionados among you! If you have a favorite horological mystery novel, please let us know so that we can add it to the library collection.

Time shows up in fiction in a lot of ways–time travel being one of the most common. People often have a desire to alter things that already happened, to see if they could get something right if they could just do it one more time. In real life, as in crime novels, we can’t go back. Time might seem to shrink and stretch when we’re affected by strong emotions, and yet it relentlessly ticks on, no matter whose heart is beating out its final rhythm, no matter whose body lies cold on the floor.