I’d given up on trying to solve Hallowe’en Party, because I couldn’t wait any longer to see the Kenneth Brannagh film adaptation A Haunting in Venice. But when I started reading the book again, I realized that the story was so drastically different that the motives and circumstances behind the crime, and possibly also the murderer, must be different in the book.
So, flush with my success in solving the movie version of this mystery, I decided to try my hand at the book. I’ll admit that my first attempt in trying to read this book and solve this mystery gave me a bit of a headache. Not only did we not know who the murderer was, we also didn’t know who their original victim must have been!
See, in the book version, Joyce Reynolds isn’t a psychic medium hired to channel the spirit of Rowena Drake’s dead daughter. Rather, she was a thirteen year old child who claims to have witnessed a murder a few years ago, but didn’t realize it was a murder until only recently. So when she turns up dead in the bucket used for bobbing for apples, it seems reasonable to assume that she was killed by whomever had committed that first murder, to keep her from revealing their identity.
Except that Joyce never actually said whose death was actually a murder, and so the next few chapters have Hercule Poirot basically compiling a list of mysterious deaths in the area over the past few years. The list of suspects, potential victims, and potential murders kept growing, and as much as I tried to keep track with my handy dandy notebook, my head hurt with trying to figure out what’s actually important information versus what’s just noise. It’s only on my second attempt to read it, and after watching the movie, that I think I managed to get some of the information straight.
There’s a shop assistant Charlotte Benfield who was killed on a footpath, and her two ex-lovers are suspects. There’s a schoolteacher Janet White who was killed on another footpath, who told her flatmate (and possible lover?) that there’s a man she was worried about.
There’s also a wealthy widow, Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe, who died of heart failure. Interesting note here is that her will had a handwritten codicil leaving everything to her au pair, Olga Seminoff. The codicil was later determined a forgery, Olga goes missing (but keeps writing letters to a friend for at least six months after), and Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe’s estate instead goes to her niece and nephew, Rowena Drake and her husband. (Like the movie, Rowena also hosted the Halloween party. And I don’t think the movie covered her husband, but here, he was disabled and died in a car accident.)
There’s also Lesley Ferrier, who was knifed in the back. He’s a notorious womanizer and the general consensus is that the husband of one of his lovers killed him, but he also worked at the law firm representing Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe’s estate, so hmm…
Poirot also seems really interested in Mrs Llewellyn-Smythe’s sunken garden, which she created with the aid of Michael Garfield, a handsome landscape architect. She left him the garden and a house as long as he kept it up for visitors to enjoy, but it seems he sold it to someone else? There’s also a scene that gives me weird vibes, where Michael sketches a 13-year-old girl, Miranda, who was Joyce’s best friend. She keeps asking where the wishing well is in the garden, and Michael tells Poirot he pretends there is one for her sake, but there really isn’t; there used to be a lucky tree but it was struck down by lightning. Anyway, the creepy vibes I got were from the adult man just randomly sketching a young girl and saying she’s someone he wouldn’t forget even when he moves away. Eww?
Back to the mystery: which death did Joyce witness and recognize only later as murder? Who was the murderer? And given that barely anyone at the party paid Joyce’s story any attention, why even bother killing her over it? And perhaps some of these stories are just noise, but perhaps also some of them are relevant. How?
This book is far twistier and more convoluted than the movie adaptation, for all the ghosts and jump scares Brannagh added in. I have a wild guess, but my gut is that my guess is far more convoluted than the solution actually is.
Did I Solve It?
Huh, I actually did. Or rather, I solved a chunk of it, and the remaining pieces of the puzzle were only possibilities I mentioned in passing but didn’t actually bother to consider in full. So, not quite feeling like it’s cause for a full celebration, but more feeling confused that I actually did figure most of it out. That’s pretty cool.
This is such a twisty Christie, and I’m not sure how I feel about it yet. I do appreciate how it confused the heck out of me, but also, I’m not sure I enjoyed her writing in this quite so much as in some of her earlier books. Poirot’s observations get a bit philosophical / poetic / flowery at times, and he makes some off-the-wall observations that feel Marple-esque but don’t quite work as well with him. Possibly all part of Poirot being older in these stories, but I think I prefer his earlier mysteries.
*** SPOILERS BELOW ***
Literary Treats 