Hallowe'en Party

"May your moustaches never grow less"

I love reading Poirot. He's just so witty and mildly snotty - I love his little quips and his friend Mrs. Oliver was funny as always as well. I love her constantly saying "oh sure, blame me".

The mystery was a bit secondary, as it sometimes is when you're reading Agatha Christie. Not that I wasn't intrigued by it, of course I was, but I loved getting to know all the people at the party and trying to understand what Poirot was getting out of the conversation with his odd questions.

This was also a sad case - the murder and death of children, so it's great to be distracted by such a good detective. I loved the Halloween Theme and their confusion about what happens during one! So fun. I look forward to show more reading more of the series! show less

My wife checked this out of the library the other day and as soon as she mentioned it, I remembered being obsessed with this book when I was a preteen, maybe 10 or 11, a little bit younger than the book's main murder victim. But it was clear from our discussions that I only remembered very specific pieces of the book (the party itself, Ariadne Oliver, Miranda). In particular, I remembered preteen me being fascinated by the realization that many of Mrs. Oliver's speeches are clearly the author talking through the character's mouth. (It was the first time I recognized that.) Since my memory didn't have much more in it than that, I read this after my wife was done.

I'm sorry, ten year old me: this book is. Well. Bad. For one thing, Christie show more isn't just talking through Mrs. Oliver's mouth. Almost every adult character in this prates on for pages about how there are definitely all these psychopaths murdering people constantly and it's the fault of people not being hanged and not getting lengthy prison terms anymore. They all hold precisely the same opinions and talk in precisely the same way, even characters you really wouldn't expect to do that. It's jarringly weird and dull.

Also, everyone interviewed by Poirot talks about the *child* who has been murdered by listing off all her faults: she was such a liar, gosh, just a terrible girl, couldn't trust a word she said, and not very bright or interesting. No one shows any regret over the murder that happened while they were grabbing burning raisins with their bare hands, and only one person has anything nice to say about the victim.

The net effect is that almost every character in this book seems to be made of cardboard and the reader spends far too much time listening to Old Woman Yelling at Clouds (Through Her Characters). The mystery itself was fine, but gosh this is not one of Christie's better books. show less

In my mind, courtesy of all those Miss Marple and Poirot TV series, I think of Agatha Christie as writing contemporaneously about England between the wars, still hanging on to its empire and with upper-class privilege unchallenged.

In reality, Agatha Christie continued to publish crime novel into the mid-1970s.

I was shocked to realise that, when this book was published in 1969, I would have been of an age to attend the children's Halloween party that the book starts with.

Yet Poirot is still there. An older dies-his-hair-to-keep-it-black Poirot, now on his thirty-ninth fiction outing. He is brought into this case by Adriadne Walker, crime writer a sort of fictional twin for Agatha Christie herself. Both of them are clearly creatures from show more an earlier age, (a phenomenon I am becoming personally acquainted with as a plod on into my sixties). They, and the older characters around them, spend a great deal of time discussing how times have changed for the worse.

There are recurring laments about the mentally ill being let loose to threaten the populace because the asylums are too full; about the sad loss of the death penalty as a deterrent to "wronguns"; about young women who, no longer protected by their families, place themselves at risk by venturing out alone and being attracted to the wrong kind of man; by the rise to normalcy of sexual assaults on children and the inappropriateness of empathy in magistrates which results in mercy taking precedence over justice.

At times, I felt as if I had wandered into an editorial from the Daily Mail.

"The Halloween Party" has what these days I'd think of as a post-episode-100 feel, when a TV series is stocked with characters we know so well that there is nothing new that they can do but we enjoy watching them do it anyway. The pace is leisurely. We gently trotted through the evidence gathering as Poirot interviewed the people who were at the Halloween Party in which a child was drowned in an apple-bobbing bucket. I was surprised at the way this death was treated - as if it were not so much a tragedy as a slightly embarrassing inconvenience. This turned out to be a plot device of sorts but it fitted into the emotional climate of the community so well that I didn't realise that until later. As we reach the denouement we do have to canter a bit and there is some physical action, although it does not, of course, involve the elderly Belgian gentleman with the big moustaches and the too-tightly-fitting patent leather shoes.

Beneath the culture-shocked social commentary and the only slightly muted patronising of those who live in "the kind of new houses that ordinary people can afford" there is a quite respectable plot, involving forgery, deception, murder and a lethal form of narcissism that was quite chilling.

What stood out for me was how well some of the children were drawn although they seemed rather old-fashioned children for the times. It also seemed to me that all the energy of this book came from the women. The men were little more than plot devices but I was left seeing the women as powerhouses of energy looking for an outlet.

I rather liked Adriadne and I found Poirot's small vanities combined with his controlled compassion rather endearing.

Hugh Fraser narrated the novel, with his, to my ear, perfect mimicry of David Suchet's Poirot and gaveAdriadne a voice that invoked the ghost of a slightly higher pitched Margaret Rutherford.

This is a comfortable mystery, despite its grim content. I enjoyed it as much for its timely reminder of unrepentantly Tory views on English life and morals were (are?) like and for its insights into how the old can fail truly to see the world the young live in as for the mystery itself show less

Hmm. This is a hard book to rate because, while it clearly demonstrates Christie's reach exceeding her grasp, it's also demonstrably more interesting because of that. Late-stage Christie is always an odd stew, because her razor-sharp capacity for puzzle box mysteries is obviously declining, but at the same time, she's trying to meet modern trends. In fact, she almost seems to relish them.

Having recently read (well, heard) "Cat Among the Pigeons" and "The Clocks," I was struck by not only how much Christie seems to be tired of mysteries at this point, but that she seems to be wanting to write about the dark side of human psychology. Could Christie have written a Patricia Highsmith-style thriller? It seems doubtful - but there are long show more stretches of "The Clocks" that play out exactly like a Hitchcock film, all gossipy people with their everyday human callousness. There's a lot of humor in that book and most of it is very dark. The tone works, even if the mystery fizzles out.

"Hallowe'en Party," in contrast, isn't very funny at all. It's terrifying - or it wants to be, anyway. This is Christie's attempt at a new, visceral, earthy kind of horror, one in which children are just as likely to be murdered as adults and some may even go willingly as sacrifices. Knowing this book came out in 1969, it's impossible not to see it trying to ride the crest of grisly, sometimes sacrilegious British horror that popped right at the end of the '60s and into the '70s.

That's not to say Christie entirely gets away with it. She doesn't, and not just because she leaves a few loose ends. You can't go halfway with this kind of horror-thriller, and I Christie's upbringing just won't let her get down in the dirt enough to give it enough welly. She's too old-fashioned; she's too genteel. She has basically all the problems attributed to Hercule Poirot and his great age in this novel (and maybe that's the point).

Having said that, it's nice to see Poirot take part in the entire novel again, even if he seems to wander a little aimlessly sometimes. Ariadne Oliver isn't *too* irritating, either. And while other reviewers have commented on the repetitive nature of the dialogue, that didn't bother me much.

As usual, I listened to Hugh Fraser read this one in my ears: calm and serenity personified. If you're going to experience "lesser later" Christie, this is the best way to do it. show less

I have come to realize that I am a rater of books based solely on how much I did or did not enjoy them. I feel safe leaving the judging of literary merit and so forth to professional reviewers. And I enjoyed this one a good bit, despite it having included:

1. The murder of a child (I can't believe it either, since having children of my own I can hardly bear to read about bad things happening to children, but somehow AC made it not so terrifying);
2. Insistence by quite a number of people that the murderer must have been a mentally ill person, set free from the institution due to overcrowding;
3. Several characters seemingly brought in just to have a nice variety;
4. A very, very tenuous connection between the clues given and the ultimate show more resolution;
and - this next one is a spoiler -
5. A really weird climax scene in which a child has arranged to meet the murderer...because she is in love with him, he being a grown adult... and better yet, he turns out to be her father. All of which had no real bearing, to my mind, on the rest of the story. show less

An Enjoyable Late Hercule Poirot Mystery

When reviewing a work, I ignore other adaptations unless necessary, but here, it is necessary, because the newest editions of this novel have been published under the title A Haunting in Venice rather than its original, Halowe'en Party. This is what's called "cross-marketing" for the 2023 film, but it's silly, because the original has no haunting - not even of the Scooby-Doo variety - and the setting is not Venice. There is, however, a Halowe'en party. There is also at least one murder, which Agatha Christie's iconic detective Hercule Poirot and his sometimes sidekick Ariadne Oliver - whom I greatly prefer to the pale John Watson imitation Arthur Hastings - must solve. Those are the only show more similarities with the film, which is an otherwise original script inspired solely by the title of the novel, which it doesn't use.

Poirot novels don't need cross-marketing. They're like Snickers bars: Most people have had one before, and the ones who liked their last one will probably like this one, and the ones who didn't much like it before won't much like this one now. To be sure, there are also Snickers connoisseurs who savor and review each bite individually, but for casual fans like me, a Snickers bar is a Snickers bar with very little variation, and it's a reliably enjoyable treat. It's also unlikely Hallowe'en Party would be any reader's first Poirot novel, because even those introduced to the character through the recent film series would presumably start with the far more famous and far more faithfully adapted Murder on the Orient Express (1934) or Death on the Nile (1937) as the film series does.

Connoisseurs may not like this novel as much because it was written and published in 1969, at the end of a decade that saw a general decline in popularity of the prim and proper locked-room British whodunits that were the character's and his creator's natural habitat of their interwar heyday. The series and its characters are showing their age, and frequent references are made to these darned kids today and their pop star fashions and sociopathic serial killers. In this "brave new world," Poirot and Christie with their lists of suspects and murders committed for love and/or money are the literary equivalent of an old pair of slippers, and just as welcome when enjoyed with a pot of hot tea by the fireplace on a cold autumn evening.

[For more on this series, see also my review of Death on the Nile (1937).] show less

The first four characters or so went on at great length about how much better everything used to be, before apparently the asylums were emptied, because everyone just loves to blame maniacs. So that was tedious, and then there is the class-based disdain, and too many people described as stupid. And I pegged the killer at introduction, and ugh.
Probably I'll be happier if I stop reading anything by Christie after, oh, let's say 1955. I like the early books when everyone is awful and there are no children around, and no one ever thinks of the servants as people but no one ever slags off about them either.
Mind you, I don't say that mysteries in general used to be better, along with everything else. And if I do ever start going off like show more that, I promise not to complain if I am murdered for it. The motive? Sheer annoyance doesn't get used enough.

Library copy show less