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Hallowe'en Party

Page history last edited by PBworks 18 years, 3 months ago

Christie, Agatha - Hallowe'en Party (1969)

 

Considering that this was one of the author’s last five books, and bearing in mind that of the other four only Nemesis is reasonable, this is surprisingly competent with a stronger plot and more involved detection than any of the others. Although it is Mrs Oliver who is present at the Hallowe’en party when the teenage Joyce Reynolds boasts that she saw a murder and is drowned in the bucket used for bobbing for apples, it is Hercule Poirot who appears centre-stage – for once, in late Christie, having made only brief appearances since After the Funeral and Destination Unknown fifteen or so years earlier. Despite his great age (aet. 100 – 110), Poirot wanders about the countryside in his too tight patent leather shoes, interviewing everyone connected with the case and bringing to light several unsuspected or unsolved murders.

 

Although the plot is more streamlined than usual for this period, it does wobble a bit. Poirot’s interviews get rather repetitious as everyone he talks to is convinced that it must have been either a modern youth or a sex offender and launches into a jeremiad about the wickedness of 1960s Britain. It is noteworthy that the most probable solution is that the murderer is either a paedophile (something not found in early Christie – when the murderer tried to kill a boy in "The Lemesurier Inheritance", written in the mid-1920s, it was for entirely different reasons) or a child murderer, someone too young to be responsible for their actions (although one should have an idea of the difference between right and wrong by the time one is eleven or twelve). As it is, though, the real murderer is obvious from very early on, with little attempt at concealment – the clue of the dropped vase is clumsily handled (Ngaio Marsh did better with a certain character "dribbling and drooling all over herself" in Overture to Death). The male murderer’s identity is more surprising – while rather improbable from a psychological standpoint, it makes sense from a symbolical and Christian one: Lucifer in the Garden of Eden, wishing to supplant God and to create at any price.

 

While hardly one of the best, there is enough in the book to make it worth reading as an example of the development of Christie’s elderly voice, concerned with problems of wickedness and morality.

 

Nick Fuller

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