Hallowe'en Party

“His mind, magnificent as it was (for he had never doubted that fact) required stimulation from outside sources.”

Agatha Christie’s use of Poirot’s third-person limited point of view highlights Poirot’s characterization as vain and self-aggrandizing as well as his method as a detective. Poirot’s confidence in his own abilities annoys other characters, particularly Mrs. Oliver, who wish him to be less rigid and more opaque in his mannerisms. Poirot’s methodology, which relies on his “little grey cells”—intellectual deduction over the unearthing of physical evidence or catching someone in the act—to solve crimes remains consistent throughout Christie’s Poirot series (Christie, Agatha. Little Grey Cells: The Quotable Poirot. William Morrow 2016).

“[Woodleigh Common is] quite an ordinary sort of place where people with what you might call every day reasonable incomes live.”

Mrs. Oliver, often read in Christie’s corpus as an analogue for Christie herself, here discusses Modernity and Social Decline, one of the book’s theme’s. Throughout the text, many characters point out that crime seems to be ubiquitous “nowadays,” illustrating the novel’s pervasive anxiety about modernity. Poirot agrees with this, to a point; he concedes crime can happen everywhere, but sees it as due to the mundanity of motives, not widespread delinquency that others equate with modernity. The “ordinary” aspects of Woodleigh Commons similarly evoke a long history in golden age detective fiction, where crimes typically happen in unexpected places, such as small, unremarkable towns.

“‘And so I’ve come along to you,’ said Mrs. Oliver, ‘because the only way [Joyce’s] death makes sense is that there really was a murder and that she was witness to it.’”

Mrs. Oliver’s claim here represents a red herring—though there really was a murder (and claiming she had witnessed it led to Joyce’s death), she was not, in fact, the true witness. Mrs. Oliver’s confidence in the logic of murder aligns her with Poirot and against the majority of the village, as pertains to assumed motive. The detective and mystery writer look for a linear logic to the case, while many villagers assume it a random act of violence.

“Well, there’s no good going on saying things were better in the old days. Perhaps we only thought so.”

Spence here offers a rare contrast to the villagers’ overall consensus that modernity is worse, in various ways, than “the old days.” His moderated sense that perhaps this view (largely held by older characters) might be fueled by nostalgia rather than truth is, however, quickly shouted down—not only by others, but by Spence’s own conviction that modernity has led to increased corruption, mental health concerns, and nonsensical violence.

“All our mental homes are too full; overcrowded, so doctors say ‘Let him or her lead a normal life. Go back and live with his relatives,’ etc. And then the nasty bit of goods, or the poor afflicted fellow, whichever way you like to look at it, gets the urge again and another young woman goes out walking and is found in a gravel pit.”

The novel shows persistent anxiety about a rise in mental health conditions and a failure to treat them adequately. The question of whether mental health crises truly are on the rise, however, remains vague throughout the novel. Various characters believe what is, in modern times, diagnosed as a mental disorder is merely a natural propensity for criminality, which the novel does not treat as an assumption based in any scientific or medical fact. Rather, this sense of criminality is vaguely connected to a (sometimes religious) sense of evil. The increased prevalence of such “nasty bit of goods,” Poirot and other characters feel, is due to a decreased attention to justice and appropriately harsh punishment—a perspective that fails to interrogate the existence of systemic bias with regard to race, class, gender, etc.

“‘Do you know what you sound like?’ said Mrs. Oliver. ‘A computer. You know. You’re programming yourself. That’s what they call it, isn’t it?’”

The discussion of fashions and popular music strictly orient Hallowe’en Party’s timeline in the late 1960s, as does Mrs. Oliver’s comment here about computers. This attention to temporality influences the novel’s understanding of itself as taking place in a modern world that is quickly changing—sometimes too quickly for the comfort of its characters—but one in which the trappings of modernity are not entirely unavailable to even its older characters.

“I needn’t tell you, Monsieur Poirot—after all, you read the papers as much as I do—that there have been very many sad fatalities with children all over the countryside. They seem to be getting more and more frequent. Mental instability seems to be on the increase, though I must say that mothers and families generally are not looking after their children properly, as they used to do.”

Mrs. Drake’s comments about the rise in child death and “mental instability” both address the novel’s anxiety over modernity and provides an ironic twist, as it is ultimately revealed that Mrs. Drake herself killed Joyce and, later, Leopold. The novel is somewhat ambivalent about verifying Mrs. Drake’s stance that the deaths of children are on the rise, as various references are made to long-past children dying. Christie remains much clearer in her controversial stance that murders committed by children are definitively increasing.

“You mean, did [Joyce] have an enemy? I think that’s silly. People don’t have enemies really. There are just people you don’t like.”

Ann Reynolds, Joyce’s older sister, makes this comment with an apparent nod toward dismissing her younger sister’s importance and agency. Her claim lends itself to the novel’s overall assertion that murders—and their motives—are often mundane rather than exceptional.

“But it seems to me with children nowadays you don’t need to look for the reason. The reason’s in another place. The reason’s in the killer’s mind. His disturbed mind or his evil mind or his kinky mind. Any kind of mind you like to call it. I’m not a psychiatrist.”

Dr. Ferguson here exhibits the same disdain for psychiatry that most of the moral compass characters hold in the novel. His specific claim that he’s not a psychiatrist, however, belies the fact that he, and others in the text, indicates the ways psychiatry has entered into the cultural zeitgeist in the late 1960s, which empowers the villagers to offer potential diagnoses for the unknown murderer.

“‘Ariadne Oliver. A best seller. People wish to interview her, to know what she thinks about such subjects as student unrest, socialism, girls’ clothing, should sex be permissive, and many other things that are no concern of hers.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Poirot, […] ‘They do not learn very much, I have noticed, from Mrs. Oliver. They learn only that she is fond of apples. That has now been known for twenty years, at least, I should think, but she still repeats it with a pleasant smile.’”

Though this comment comes from Michael, one of the novel’s antagonists, his frustration with Mrs. Oliver receiving questions that have nothing to do with writing underscore Christie’s own well-known dislike of press attention. Poirot’s response about repeating a banal answer pleasantly suggests Christie’s own strategy for dealing with more aggressive members of the press.

“‘Yes, I suppose it is a Greek name,’ said Mrs. Oliver. ‘It’s my own, you know. I didn’t just make it up for literary purposes.’”

This comment about Greek names highlights several of Christie’s key literary and self-referential allusions in the text. Miranda’s name is notably important; she, like Miranda from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, symbolizes innocence. Ariadne Oliver (here positioned as an analogue to Christie) points out that Ariadne, a Greek name like Agatha, may just be a name—not a clever literary allusion.

“It was not unknown in the present age for children to commit crimes, quite young children. Children of seven, of nine and so on, and it was often difficult to know how to dispose of these natural, it seemed, young criminals who came before the juvenile courts. Excuses had to be brought for them. Broken homes. Negligent and unsuitable parents.”

The novel attempts to discredit the idea that childhood is inherently innocent, positioning The Falseness of Childhood Innocence as a central theme. The clear disdain for the “excuses” offered to child criminals is underscored by the novel’s repeated desire for a return to older, harsher punishments for crimes. The novel does not fully reject the idea that childhood can be innocent—as Miranda embodies an ideal of youthful innocence—instead it vaguely indicates that this innocence is part of a natural (and therefore perhaps predetermined) divide between good and evil.

“‘I am beginning to believe, you know, that what everybody has told me must be right,’ [Poirot] added with a sigh. ‘It usually is.’”

Hallowe’en Party relies heavily on local gossip, reiterating the importance of community knowledge to Poirot’s method. Poirot asks the same questions to different characters and, largely, gets the same answers. Instead of rejecting the information revealed through these often-repetitive dialogues, however, Christie supports the idea that what is commonly held to be true is true, thus valorizing community knowledge. It is through the outliers, by contrast, in speech and action, that Poirot identifies his killers.

“Doctors don’t [know much], if you ask me. Still, it’s made a lot of difference nowadays. All this inoculation they give children, and that. Not nearly as many cases [of polio] as there were.”

This comment, given by an unnamed gardener, demonstrates another of the novel’s few, and typically tepid, acknowledgements of the benefits of modern progress. Little attention is given to non-psychiatric medical developments in the text, but the decreased prevalence of polio is treated as an unquestioned positive.

“[Poirot appraised Desmond and Nicholas] in the Hercule Poirot manner, masked behind a foreign shield of flattering words and much increased foreign mannerisms, so that they themselves should feel agreeably contemptuous of him, though hiding that under politeness and good manners.”

Poirot and Olga Seminoff indicate, in the text, the pervasive distrust that the English characters hold for “foreigners.” This prejudice ends up dooming Olga—as a foreigner considered suspicious by various characters, it’s easier for Michael and Mrs. Drake to make her a scapegoat—a fact Poirot recognizes and uses as a tool, one that gets him the information that he wants in interviews.

“You mind more about your clothes and your mustaches and how you look and what you wear than comfort. Now comfort is really the great thing.”

Mrs. Oliver here scolds Poirot for his attention to fashion over function, emphasizing vanity as a pervasive part of Poirot’s characterization across the novels in which he appears. Coming from Mrs. Oliver, the criticism is not easily dismissed nor is it wholeheartedly embraced, as she is one of the moral compass characters in the novel but is also herself sometimes portrayed as ridiculous.

“The present is nearly always rooted in the past.”

Here, Poirot gives voice to one of the key tenets of crime solving, which ultimately leads him to the murderers and the truth behind the various, interconnected crimes in the novel. However, it fails to connect back to the novel’s anxiety about modern developments—frequently framed as a disruption from the past, rather than a contiguous aspect of social understanding across time.

“‘Did you think you might put her in a book some day?’

‘I do hate that phrase being used. People are always saying it to me and it’s not true. Not really. I don’t put people in books. People I meet, people I know.’

‘Is it perhaps not true to say, Madame, that you do put people in books sometimes? People that you meet, but not, I agree, people that you know. There would be no fun in that.’”

Mrs. Oliver’s frustration with being asked about putting people she knows in books—and the differentiation between “knowing” and “meeting” someone—suggests Christie’s own frustration with similar questions. Her subsequent understanding of how observations taken from life are different from truly basing a character on a known, real-world person offers a nuanced understanding of Christie’s own process of inspiration and inoculates the author against being asked if characters represent people in her life.

“It is always difficult to know if you like anyone beautiful. You like beauty to look at, at the same time you dislike beauty almost on principle.”

Poirot’s internal observation reflects the novel’s ambivalent approach to beauty. While he marvels at the Quarry Garden, for example, Michael’s beauty is likened to that of Lucifer in the Christian tradition. Miranda, by contrast, is beautiful and represents innocence and purity. This indicates that the novel holds beauty as an amoral factor that can be by turns good, evil, or neutral.

“If a Council takes over—and that’s what happens very often nowadays—then it will be what they call ‘kept up.’ The latest sort of shrubs may be put in, extra paths will be made, seats will be put at certain distances. Litter bins even may be erected. Oh, they are so careful, so kind at preserving. You can’t preserve this. It’s wild. To keep something wild is far more difficult than to preserve it.”

This contrast between manicuring/preserving and keeping nature wild underscores the novel’s critique of modernity. While the novel doesn’t wholly endorse this comment, as it comes from Michael—who values natural beauty to an excess that is characterized as “madness”—it also can’t be wholly disregarded, as Miranda too adores the wild nature of the wood.

“[Michael Garfield] gave his head a sharp shake. ‘Why do you come and talk to me about things like that here, in my beautiful wood?’

‘I wanted to know.’

‘It’s better not to know. It’s better never to know. Better to leave things as they are. Not push and pry and poke.’

‘You want beauty,’ said Hercule Poirot. ‘Beauty at any price. For me, it is truth I want. Always truth.’

Michael Garfield laughed. ‘Go on home to your police friends and leave me here in my local paradise. Get thee beyond me, Satan.’”

Michael contrasts the natural beauty of the wood with material, worldly concerns like policing and truth. This conversation, as Poirot later notes, cements the detective’s understanding of Michael’s culpability, as it confirms his understanding of Michael as someone with dubious priorities.

“‘You must believe that, I meant well.’

Such sad words, Poirot thought, some of the saddest words in the world.”

Mrs. Drake’s comment takes on a dramatic irony, as she herself kills both Joyce and Leopold—the opposite, as she here claims, of wanting to protect them. Poirot’s reaction, however, implies the sad consequences of “meaning well” when it comes to protecting criminal children—which, in this context, he positions as further tragedy.

“It was not very characteristic of Hercule Poirot to ask the opinions of others. He was usually quite satisfied with his own opinions.

[…] ‘That does not seem very characteristic of you, Monsieur Poirot. Are you not usually satisfied with your own opinions?’

‘Yes, I am satisfied with my own opinions.’”

This moment proves unique in the text—one in which Miss Emlyn seems to know precisely, almost word for word, what Poirot is thinking in his internal narration. The repetitive nature of the dialogue is consistent with the rest of the novel, which shows words and phrases being repeated over different conversations, with the same or different characters. This moment of knowing is also consistent with Miss Emlyn’s characterization as having a keen eye for people. Yet, the precision of this understanding is not fully reconciled since Poirot does not comment upon it.