As someone who occasionally likes to read books that match the season they’re in, I decided in October to read Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie. I don’t know why the apostrophe is in there, but it is.

I read this book mostly on flights to and from Utah, so it isn’t impossible that I missed some details as I read and as I dozed on and off over the course of a 5-6 hour flight.

This was a Hercule Poirot novel, so the Belgian detective with the immaculate mustache was called on to investigate the murder of a 13 year old girl, who was killed by drowning in a bobbing-for-apples bucket at – you guessed it – a Halloween party.

I never want to give away the ending to mysteries, because that’s – for lack of a better term – completely douchy, so I will just comment on how I felt about this particular mystery.

I went through a phase my freshman year of college where I read, easily, 15-20 of Agatha Christie’s mysteries, and I found all of them entertaining, although some more clever than others.

I found this one dark, not so much because of the subject matter – murder is always dark – but the murder of a 13 year old has a particular blackness about it, and so does the motive. But what really got me was the way the characters in the book blamed the girl – Joyce – for her own death, because she wasn’t particularly likable. (Actually, in the telling of this tale, almost nobody was very likable.)

Joyce was 13, and a serial teller of tall tales. She adopted other people’s stories as her own, and exaggerated greatly many of her own roles in stories, and she was a showoff and sort of mouthy. She was also referred to as a bit dim.

Now, it would be quite understandable if other children disliked her. Children are children and I forgive them for judging their peers. They know each other in a way adults don’t, and have to deal with other children in the way adults don’t. But the adults in this book seem to really dislike her, and seem to think her mother may be slightly overreacting to her death.

There’s no hints that she’ll grow out of it or anything of the sort – as lots of kids do grow out of their most obnoxious traits as they grow up and mature. It’s just a bunch of adults saying stuff like, “Yeah, Joyce the liar, heh, no redeeming qualities, won’t miss her much, I don’t know why her mother is so upset.”

Ok, they didn’t exactly say that, but I got that definite sense reading the story.

I don’t know if this was time Agatha Christie was writing in, where children were not considered to be super special snowflakes and expected to be small adults who were never going to change as they grew up, or if this was done on purpose as some sort of story telling technique/plot device. I just didn’t love it.

I did enjoy visiting with Hercule Poirot again, as I hadn’t read a story of his in quite some time. And I did enjoy his friend, Ariadne Oliver, a mystery writer (who called him in to investigate because, uh, nobody seemed to think it was odd a 13 year old drowned in a bobbing-for-apples tub?). She was the only adult in the story who seemed to be alarmed that a child was murdered and she definitely didn’t like murder outside of her stories. A self-insert by the author, maybe? Another likable character was Miranda, Joyce’s close friend, but she was under utilized.

As with all of Dame Christie’s books, I did enjoy it, it just wasn’t my favorite of her stories. The ending didn’t feel natural, the whole story felt a bit convoluted, and there were some loose ends. Plus, as I mentioned, almost nobody in the book was very likable.

Hallowe’en Party was a short book (a very redeeming quality), and not terrible, but overall, not Agatha’s best.

Tagged: authors: agatha christie, books: hallowe'en party, genre: mystery