Hallowe'en Party - Agatha Christie [102]
Time: ‘First-rate Christie: fast, complicated, wryly funny.’
Charles Osborne on Hallowe’en Party
As she approached her eightieth year, Agatha Christie was careful to conserve her energy. Public appearances, always infrequent, now became fewer, and her family, her garden, and her writing occupied most of her time. Writing remained enormously important to her. ‘I am like a sausage machine,’ she had told Francis Wyndham. ‘As soon as one is made and cut off the string, I have to think of the next one.’ But equally important to her was Max Mallowan’s archaeology. ‘I retreat into myself with fiction,’ she said. ‘I emerge from myself in my husband’s work.’
In 1969, asked to contribute to Adam, a literary magazine, a short article on the French novelist Simeonon, Agatha Christie wrote a very brief letter of refusal which the editor published: ‘I do not really feel that authors should comment on their own opinion of other authors’ work unless they are doing so as a professional reviewer, and I never review or criticize books. One talks about authors one likes to one’s friends, but I never give my views professionally.’
In the autumn, the new Christie title was a Poirot crime novel, Hallowe’en Party, dedicated to P.G. Wodehouse, ‘whose books and stories have brightened my life for many years. Also, to show my pleasure in his having been kind enough to tell me that he enjoys my books.’ That the most widely read novelist of all should want to boast of being praised by a fellow writer is touching, for it indicates, surely, that even at this late stage of her career she valued what might be called intellectual respectability. She must have known that her readers ranged from the near cretinous to the intellectually brilliant. Many, in both categories, were university professors, even more were shop assistants and factory hands. Among the geniuses, Sigmund Freud was a devoted reader of Agatha Christie (and, it must be admitted, of Dorothy L. Sayers as well),11 as was the great orchestral conductor, Otto Klemperer…
The characters in Hallowe’en Party are not all as sharply drawn as in vintage Christie, and although the plot is typically convoluted there are a number of careless loose ends which could easily (and should) have been attended to. The Poirot–Ariadne Oliver relationship, however, is engagingly described, and it is always fascinating to hear Mrs Oliver holding forth about her method as a crime novelist. We think we know what Mrs Oliver, and perhaps Dame Agatha Christie, think of Poirot. In Hallowe’en Party we find Poirot murmuring to himself about Mrs Oliver: ‘It is a pity that she is so scatty. And yet, she had originality of mind.’ This might almost be Agatha Christie’s summing-up of herself.
In The Secret of Chimneys in 1925 the country of Herzoslovakia was invented. A story in The Labours of Hercules (1947) is set in the same country. In Hallowe’en Party (and in Third Girl: 1966) there is passing reference to a country called Her(t)-zogovinia. The question of whether or not it is spelt with a ‘t’ can be put down to the vagaries of transliteration from Balkan cyrillic script, but is this country a neighbour of Herzoslovakia, or the same country after a no doubt violent change of regime? Who can tell?
Hallowe’en Party is an odd novel. Perhaps it is not so odd that Poirot should have a close friend called Solomon Levy, through it would not have happened in the early Poirot stories of the 1920s. But it is curious that Poirot, as he grows older, should be so moved by male beauty. There was an instance in Third Girl, and now in Hallowe’en Party he is struck by
…a young man, so Poirot now recognized, of an unusual beauty. One didn’t think of young men that way nowadays. You said of a young man that he was sexy or madly attractive,