Hallowe'en Party

Ariadne Oliver is one of the third-person narrators of the novel. Mrs. Oliver appears in several of Christie’s novels and is Hercule Poirot’s friend; when Joyce Reynolds is killed at a party that Mrs. Oliver attends, she summons Poirot to Woodleigh Common to help solve the case. Mrs. Oliver is a mystery novelist who is sometimes seen as representing Agatha Christie herself, though her biographical and personal overlap with the real-world novelist proves inconsistent.

Christie presents Mrs. Oliver as an overall reliable character in the novel, for all that she is occasionally framed as being ridiculous. Her love of apples, for example, is played up as being both slightly absurd and as a clever way to avoid unwanted probing questions from the press—she calmly, politely offers them the detail that she loves apples even though this is something she has revealed in interviews for decades. This, in turn, becomes a bit of a joke in the text, as Joyce’s death in the bucket of water used to bob for apples has spoiled Mrs. Oliver’s longstanding taste for them. She (reluctantly and with limited enjoyment) switches to eating dates, instead.

Mrs. Oliver is, like Poirot, a static character in the text. Her personality toggles between seriousness and absurdity, qualities that Christie frames as longstanding. Mrs. Oliver is prone to affront; she repeatedly expresses outrage that Poirot is “blaming” her for his involvement in the case, or for Joyce’s decision to brag about being a murder witness (which, in turn, leads to Joyce’s own murder).

Miranda Butler is the daughter of Judith Butler, Mrs. Oliver’s friend from a recent trip to Greece. Miranda represents childlike innocence in the novel, a quality signaled by her love of untamed natural spaces, such as Quarry Wood. Her name comes from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. 

Christie frames Miranda’s innocence as a predominantly positive quality, though it also lends to naiveté and positions her as a foil to characters such as Leopold Reynolds that exemplify the novel’s thematic engagement with The Falseness of Childhood Innocence. When Michael tells Miranda that she must be killed as a sacrifice, Miranda goes along with him willingly. She comes to believe that this sacrifice is justified, as she feels naively responsible for Joyce’s death. Miranda does not attend the Hallowe’en party where Joyce is killed; she is home sick. This chance emboldens Joyce, who is known for her propensity for lying, to pass off Miranda’s murder witness story as her own.

Christie portrays Miranda’s love of nature as something that leads both to tragedy and justice. Because she witnesses the aftermath of Olga’s murder, she’s able to provide justice for the au pair, even if it comes too late to save her life. Because she keeps this information to herself, then shares it only with Joyce (whose stories she believes, unlike anyone else in Woodleigh Common), Mrs. Drake and Michael get away with further crimes for several years.

Miranda is nearly killed in the novel’s climax after she willingly escapes her mother and Mrs. Oliver to join Michael at the standing stones, knowing that he intends to sacrifice her. Only Desmond and Nicholas’s timely intervention saves her. At the end of the novel, Mrs. Butler reveals that Miranda is Michael’s daughter, the result of an affair with Mrs. Butler and the gardener when she was young. Miranda, despite her ignorance of her parentage, expresses her love for Michael even after knowing of his crimes.

Joyce Reynolds is the first victim in the novel—killed at the titular Hallowe’en party. Joyce is not widely liked in Woodleigh Common, as Poirot’s subsequent interviews reveal. She’s commonly regarded as a liar who makes outrageous claims merely for attention. The various townspeople that Poirot interviews about Joyce’s character give responses that underscore the perceived connection between Modernity and Social Decline. Joyce’s tendency to tell lies to shore up her own insecurities positions her as the perfect victim in detective fiction of the period—mostly innocent, but guilty of a moral failing that ultimately brings about her death.

As the only person who believes Joyce’s outlandish tales, Miranda tells her about witnessing a murder in order to impress her friend, paralleling Joyce’s own desire to impress Mrs. Oliver by repeating the tale as her own.

Rowena Drake is one of the antagonists in Hallowe’en Party. As the host of the titular party, Mrs. Drake overhears Joyce bragging about witnessing a murder and recalls her suspicions that she and Michael, her romantic partner, were seen carrying Olga Seminoff’s body several years prior. She kills Joyce and later Leopold Reynolds to eliminate his threat of blackmail.

Christie frames Mrs. Drake as a highly competent woman who has little patience for the foibles of others. Different characters observe that she is dedicated to improving the community according to her own values, though they dispute that these efforts make her popular or easy to like. Her late husband was disabled from polio; Mrs. Drake claims guilt over her failure to protect her husband from the car accident that killed him, though this claim is cast as suspicious due to her affair with Michael, which began soon after her husband died.

Mrs. Drake’s late husband was her first cousin, which is relevant to the inheritance plot; Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe was aunt to both Mr. and Mrs. Drake, so Mr. Drake’s death left Rowena the sole inheritor of Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe’s fortune. Michael subsequently targets Mrs. Drake to improve his own access to Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe’s estate.

Mrs. Drake routinely preaches her desire for compassion, particularly for young people who commit crimes—a perspective that counters the novel’s position on The Falseness of Childhood Innocence. The novel’s overall skepticism about this position is further emphasized by the revelation of Mrs. Drake’s murderousness. Not only, the text suggests, is this position unwise, but it’s unlikely to be genuine due to Mrs. Drake’s poor moral character. While the level to which Mrs. Drake justifies her own behavior is uncertain, her sympathy for Leopold, at least, is a clear ruse, as she herself kills him.