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Product Description
Colin Dexter
'Jim Kelly . . . a sparkling star, newly risen in the crime fiction firmament'
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
Philip Dryden is a senior reporter on the Crow, a paper based in Ely in the Cambridgeshire fen district. His life has been in disarray since Laura, his wife, was left in a coma following a bad car crash in which he could have drowned - an old fear from childhood. Now a body is discovered in a block of ice in the boot of a sunken car. The next day a corpse is discovered riding a stone gargoyle on the roof of Ely Cathedral. Forensic evidence links both victims to an event in 1966. Dryden is more involved than he realises, and eventually he faces a ruthless killer. It all makes for an exciting and unusual crime thriller. The atmosphere is brilliantly described.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
Humphrey H. Holt's licensed minicab crept across the fen like the model motorcar on a giant Monopoly board. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Humphrey H. Holt's licensed minicab crept across the fen like the model motorcar on a giant Monopoly board. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Jim Kelly seems to me to have pulled off that rare feat of writing a novel for all tastes:
It is funny, compelling, haunting and generally a very good read.
Handsome Philip Dryden is a newspaper reporter turned detective. His slothful side-kick Humph is a triumph of a creation. Taciturn in his own language, he lives in a fog of foreign language tapes inside his shoddy cab in which the meter always reads £2.95.
The Water Clock is an extraordinarily visual work – easy to imagine on television. The brooding presence of the Fens, the elemental forces of nature, set against the drama of individual lives.. It reminded me a little of Thomas Hardy’s Egdon Heath.
One of the finest comic scenes has police in full riot gear ludicrously tiptoeing in tortoise formation towards a suspect’s home, observed with laconic interest by Dryden from the window seat of his favourite Chinese restaurant.
The narrative is fast-paced, breathlessly so at times, as Dryden's investigation pulls him back through time to a crime committed in 1966.
Kelly’s account of the daily lives of local newspaper reporters is among the most convincing I have read, even if their diet of news stories is often more humdrum.
This has all the style and grace of a serious novel, the fun of a comic novel and the charge of a top-notch thriller.
It is funny, compelling, haunting and generally a very good read.
Handsome Philip Dryden is a newspaper reporter turned detective. His slothful side-kick Humph is a triumph of a creation. Taciturn in his own language, he lives in a fog of foreign language tapes inside his shoddy cab in which the meter always reads £2.95.
The Water Clock is an extraordinarily visual work – easy to imagine on television. The brooding presence of the Fens, the elemental forces of nature, set against the drama of individual lives.. It reminded me a little of Thomas Hardy’s Egdon Heath.
One of the finest comic scenes has police in full riot gear ludicrously tiptoeing in tortoise formation towards a suspect’s home, observed with laconic interest by Dryden from the window seat of his favourite Chinese restaurant.
The narrative is fast-paced, breathlessly so at times, as Dryden's investigation pulls him back through time to a crime committed in 1966.
Kelly’s account of the daily lives of local newspaper reporters is among the most convincing I have read, even if their diet of news stories is often more humdrum.
This has all the style and grace of a serious novel, the fun of a comic novel and the charge of a top-notch thriller.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A marvellous British thriller in which a down-at-heel journalist tracksdown a double murderer in a brilliantly-realised Fenland setting. Thewriting style is first class and the background details of the character(wife in a coma, overweight cab driving assistant, run-down local paper)gives scope for a series. Setting the events over one week keeps theaction zipping along
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A pretty good read. It is strong on setting - the Fens make a powerful backdrop to a who-dun-it plot and there is a real sense of how a landscape can influence characters.
It is also strong on humour - not unlike, say, Robert B. Parker. This helps the book jog along nicely. It also avoids the potential cliches of choosing a newspaper reporter as sleuth-hero. Jim Kelly's authoritative picture of mediocre, dysfunctional, disappointed lives spent in the grotty back-waters of British journalism also meant my sense of credibility over Dryden, the main character, was not stretched too far.
Jim Kelly is no Tolstoy but the characters are good enough. Dryden, the reporter with a coma-stricken wife, has enough complexity to stay interesting. His partner, Humph, the fat cabbie, is a real hoot.
It is also strong on humour - not unlike, say, Robert B. Parker. This helps the book jog along nicely. It also avoids the potential cliches of choosing a newspaper reporter as sleuth-hero. Jim Kelly's authoritative picture of mediocre, dysfunctional, disappointed lives spent in the grotty back-waters of British journalism also meant my sense of credibility over Dryden, the main character, was not stretched too far.
Jim Kelly is no Tolstoy but the characters are good enough. Dryden, the reporter with a coma-stricken wife, has enough complexity to stay interesting. His partner, Humph, the fat cabbie, is a real hoot.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Fun, horror and great writing in the Fens
I loved this book. An engaging main character, an interesting back story (believable? Well .. perhaps not, but interesting nonetheless), a fund of well drawn minor characters, and... Read more
Published 20 months ago by onlyolney
Excellent opener to the Dryden series
Hats off to Jim Kelly for getting his series of Philip Dryden books off to a cracking start with The Water Clock. Read more
Published 23 months ago by Jl Adcock
Water a Way to Start
'The Water Clock' is a great debut novel from Jim Kelly and hints that he could go on to become one of the best crime writers in the UK. Read more
Published on 22 Feb 2007 by Sam
Enjoy the writing and enjoy trying to guess whodunnit!
I don't really go for crime fiction, but this is enjoyably quirky and has a good plot to boot, so I had trouble putting it down. Read more
Published on 23 Mar 2006 by Myrtle
Atmospheric And Eminently Readable
The story is set in the Fens, and, as such, has an immediate appeal to anyone familiar with the area, particularly Ely, and it's immediate surroundings. Read more
Published on 18 Feb 2006 by K. F. Moore
Gripping Detective Story
A first rate policier that accurately captures the spooky atmosphere of the Fens. Kelly is gifted at displaying the power of climate over our lives: rising tides, threatening... Read more
Published on 7 April 2005
The clock is dripping
You might wonder why this book is titled 'The Water Clock'. A water clock does put in a brief appearance and it has a small but significant part in the plot. Read more
Published on 2 Jun 2004 by Sally-Anne
Great debut
Debuts are often described as “promising”, their writers as “someone to watch”. However, every year there are one or two that extend beyond that. Read more
Published on 11 Mar 2004 by RachelWalker
A master of place, character and plot
I'm not normally a great reader of crime fiction, so that makes Jim Kelly's achievement all the more impressive for me. Read more
Published on 21 July 2003 by J. F. Bell
Look East
This a sparkling read. The Fens have rarely seemed so interesting. Kelly clearly is a fan of East Anglia and paints an evocative picture of it before we get to know the full extent... Read more
Published on 15 Nov 2002
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