Books: Halloween Party By Agatha Christie (1969)

“At a Hallowe’en party, Joyce – a hostile thirteen-year-old – boasts that she once witnessed a murder. When no-one believes her, she storms off home. But within hours her body is found, still in the house, drowned in an apple-bobbing tub. That night, Hercule Poirot is called in to find the ‘evil presence’. But first he must establish whether he is looking for a murderer or a double-murderer. Unmasking a murderer isn't going to be easy for Poirot. But with his friend, crime novelist Ariadne Oliver,  they investigate reckless teenagers and take on occult themes. Again, the sharp wits of Poirot and the enthusiastic deduction of Mrs Oliver join forces.”

Not a particularly exciting whodunit, but it does have the usual Christie flair of sometimes witty, sometimes mean characters. And it’s her only book where a child is murdered. The novel, though, is seemly concerned with how times have changed since Ms. Christie’s first book was released in 1920. Published 1969, near the end of her life, Halloween Party has many characters commenting on the how society has really changed in those last fifty years. There are a lot of discussions about how the criminal justice system has changed, which was probably a not so veiled reference to abolition of capital punishment in 1965 in the UK. But all the older characters seem a bit bitter that youths are taking over and disrespecting their elders and getting away with major crimes because they come from broken homes. Also, it seems, in her old age, Christie appears somewhat taken aback about how the world changed in the 1960s –the more permissiveness of any era she lived in.

The book lags and comes off more simple and less complex than her previous works –almost (maybe) like she needed a book to fulfill a contract. Still, she would publish three more novels, 1971s Nemesis, her last written featuring Miss Marple, 1972s Elephants Can Remember, the last novel she wrote featuring Hercule Poirot, and 1973s Postern of Fate, the last featuring her other recurring detectives, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. However, there were two more books featuring Poirot and Miss Marple to come. Christie, fearing she be killed during WWII, decide to write two novels that would be published after her death. So during the height of this terrible period in the 1940s, she wrote Curtain (1975), the “official” last Hercule Poirot mystery and Sleeping Murder (1976), the “official” last Miss Marple mystery. They would sit in a vault for the next three decades. But in the span of those thirty-odd years, she never went back and revised them, so they’re somewhat set outside of her established continuity of both those characters.

Indecently, actor/director Kenneth Branagh will helm and star in an adaptation of this book set for the fall of 2023. What changes will be made to the story should be interesting. The two remakes Branagh did, Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile were both set in 1934 and 1937, respectively. A Haunting in Venice, the title of this new film, will probably have to be set in the same time period. So I’m guessing all the “social commentary” of the late 1960s will be excised.