Hallowe'en Party

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Hallowe'en Party
Hallowe'en Party First Edition Cover 1969.jpg
Dust-jacket illustration of the first UK edition
Author Agatha Christie
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Genre Crime fiction
Publisher Collins Crime Club
Publication date
November 1969
Media typePrint (hardback & paperback)
Pages256 (first edition, hardcover)
Preceded by By the Pricking of My Thumbs  
Followed by Passenger to Frankfurt  

Hallowe'en Party is a work of detective fiction by English writer Agatha Christie, first published in the United Kingdom by the Collins Crime Club in November 1969 [1] and in the United States by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year. [2] [3] This book was dedicated to writer P. G. Wodehouse. It has been adapted for television, radio, and most recently for the film A Haunting in Venice (2023).

Contents

The novel features Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and the mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver. A boastful girl at a Hallowe'en party tells Mrs. Oliver she once witnessed a murder; the same girl is later drowned in an apple-bobbing bucket, and Poirot must solve a two-pronged mystery: who killed the girl, and what, if anything, did she witness?

Synopsis

While visiting her friend Judith Butler in Woodleigh Common, Ariadne Oliver assists the neighbors in planning a children's Hallowe'en Party at wealthy Rowena Drake's house. Upon meeting Mrs. Oliver, 13-year-old Joyce Reynolds claims she once witnessed a murder, though at the time she was too young to recognize it as such. Though no one appears to believe her, Joyce is found drowned in an apple-bobbing bucket after the party; distraught, Mrs. Oliver summons Hercule Poirot to solve the case.

With help from retired Superintendent Spence, Poirot makes a list of recent deaths and disappearances in the area of Woodleigh Common. Of these, three stand out as significant:

Interviewing the townsfolk, Poirot learns a few interesting facts:

Leopold is found dead. Rowena informs Poirot that she had seen him in the library the night of the party, and she believes he witnessed his sister's murder.

Poirot advises the police to search the woods near the quarry. The search finds Olga's body in an abandoned well, stabbed in the same manner as Ferrier. Fearing another murder, Poirot sends a telegram to Mrs. Oliver, instructing her to take Judith and her daughter to London.

Miranda meets with Garfield, who takes her to a pagan sacrificial altar, intending to poison her. However, he commits suicide when two youths recruited by Poirot save Miranda's life. Miranda reveals that she was the one who saw Garfield and Rowena drag Olga's body through the quarry garden, and she secretly told Joyce. Miranda had not been present at the preparations for the party, so Joyce tried to seek famous Ariadne's attention by claiming Miranda's story as her own.

Poirot lays out the solution to Mrs. Oliver and Mrs. Butler. Rowena began an affair with Garfield while her dying husband was still alive. Disgusted by this, Rowena's aunt wrote a codicil that left her fortune to Olga. The lovers then plotted to discredit Olga's claim, hiring Ferrier to replace the codicil with a deliberately clumsy forgery to ensure Rowena inherited everything; the real codicil has now been found by the police. Both Olga and Ferrier were murdered to conceal the deceit, but Rowena suspected someone had witnessed the disposal of Olga's body. Rowena killed Joyce when she claimed she had witnessed a murder, unaware that Joyce had appropriated Miranda's story. The dropping of the vase, which Mrs. Whittaker witnessed, was to disguise the fact that Rowena was already wet from drowning Joyce. Leopold was murdered because he asked Rowena for money, and she suspected he knew something.

Poirot muses that Rowena likely would have shared a similar fate to Olga, as Garfield's motivation for the murder was his obsession with constructing a second, more perfect garden. Once he had Rowena's money, he would soon have no more need of her, as she had already provided him with a Greek island.

Poirot also reveals that Judith is not really a widow. She once had a brief affair with Michael Garfield, and Miranda is the child of that union. The Butlers met Michael again by chance years later; though fond of Miranda, Michael was willing to kill his own child to satisfy his need to create. Satisfied with Poirot's help, Judith thanks him.

Characters

Literary significance and reception

Contemporaneous reviews were largely negative, though tempered by an appreciation of Christie's advanced years. Author and academic Robert Barnard, who in 1980 wrote a monograph on Christie, stated, "The plot of this late one is not too bad, but the telling is very poor: it is littered with loose ends, unrealised characters, and maintains only a marginal hold on the reader's interest. Much of it reads as if spoken into a tape-recorder and never read through afterward." [4] Christie did sometimes use a dictaphone when writing. According to her grandson, "She used to dictate her stories into a machine called a dictaphone and then a secretary typed this up into a typescript, which my grandmother would correct by hand." [5]

Robert Weaver in the Toronto Daily Star of 13 December 1969 wrote "Hallowe'en Party...is a disappointment, but with all her accomplishments Miss Christie can be forgiven some disappointments...Poirot seems weary and so does the book." [6]

Critical reassessment in more recent years has led to more favorable reviews, however. In Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World, a 2020 non-fiction study of every Poirot novel for the character's centennial, [7] Mark Aldridge describes Hallowe'en Party as "a highly memorable and intriguing novel that makes a lasting impression on the reader." While commenting on the novel's flaws, such as unresolved story threads and an "unusually underwritten murderer", Aldridge writes it has "an energetic and exciting opening, one excellent clue hiding in plain sight, and a tone of grim fascination towards the murder throughout." He notes how Christie was downbeat about what she perceived as rising cruelty and criminality in the wider world and that she read reports on current crime as a part of her inspiration.

References and allusions

References to other works

References to actual history, geography and current science

Publication history

The novel was first serialised in the weekly magazine Woman's Own in seven abridged instalments from 15 November to 27 December 1969, illustrated with uncredited photographic montages.

In the US, the novel appeared in the December 1969 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.

Adaptations

Radio

Hallowe'en Party was adapted for radio and broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 30 October 1993, featuring John Moffatt as Hercule Poirot, with Stephanie Cole as Ariadne Oliver. [10]

Television

British

The novel was adapted as part of the twelfth series of Agatha Christie's Poirot with David Suchet, with Zoë Wanamaker reprising her role as Ariadne Oliver. Guest stars include Deborah Findlay as Rowena Drake, Julian Rhind-Tutt as Michael Garfield, Amelia Bullmore as Judith Butler, and Fenella Woolgar as Elizabeth Whittaker. Charles Palmer (who also directed The Clocks for the series) directs this instalment, with the screenplay written by Mark Gatiss (who wrote the screenplay for Cat Among the Pigeons ; he also appeared as a guest star in the adaptation of Appointment with Death ).

The television adaptation shifted the late 1960s setting to the 1930s, as with nearly all episodes in this series.

French

The novel was adapted as a 2014 episode of the French television series Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie .

Graphic novel

Hallowe'en Party was released by HarperCollins as a graphic novel adaptation on 3 November 2008, adapted and illustrated by "Chandre" ( ISBN   0-00-728054-8).

Film

The novel was loosely adapted by Kenneth Branagh in 2023 for his third Poirot film, [11] re-titled A Haunting in Venice and relocated from England to the titular city. The film followed Branagh's previous Poirot adaptations Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and Death on the Nile (2022). [12]

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References

  1. ↑ Chris Peers, Ralph Spurrier and Jamie Sturgeon. Collins Crime Club – A checklist of First Editions. Dragonby Press (Second Edition) March 1999 (p. 15)
  2. ↑ John Cooper and B.A. Pyke. Detective Fiction – the collector's guide: Second Edition (pp. 82, 87) Scholar Press. 1994. ISBN   0-85967-991-8
  3. ↑ American Tribute to Agatha Christie
  4. ↑ Barnard, Robert (1990). A Talent to Deceive – an appreciation of Agatha Christie – Revised edition. Fontana Books. p. 194. ISBN   0-00-637474-3.
  5. ↑ "How Christie Wrote". AgathaChristie.com. Agatha Christie Limited.
  6. ↑ Weaver, Robert (13 December 1969). "Unknown title". Toronto Daily Star . p. 58.
  7. ↑ Aldridge, Mark (12 November 2020). Agatha Christie's Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World. HarperCollins. ISBN   978-0008296612.
  8. ↑ Bunson, Matthew (2000). The Complete Christie: An Agatha Christie Encyclopedia. Simon & Schuster. p. 69. ISBN   978-0671028312.
  9. ↑ Lee, Amy (7 February 2003). Agatha Christie: Hallowe'en Party. The Literary Encyclopedia. Retrieved 13 April 2017.
  10. ↑ "Hallowe'en Party". BBC Genome. 30 October 1993. Retrieved 26 July 2020.
  11. ↑ Massoto, Erick (3 March 2022). "A Third Hercule Poirot Film Has Been Written, Says 20th Century Studios President". Collider. Retrieved 4 March 2022.
  12. ↑ "Kenneth Branagh's Third Hercule Poirot Film 'A Haunting in Venice' Casts Tina Fey, Jamie Dornan, Michelle Yeoh and More". Variety. 10 October 2022.
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