51 pages • 1 hour read
Hallowe'en Party
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Symbols & Motifs
Apples
Throughout the novel, Agatha Christie uses apples as a recurring motif for danger—a connection internal characters overtly notice. Poirot, for example, notes how Apple Trees, Mrs. Drake’s house, is a fitting site for a murder in which a girl was killed in the bucket used to bob for apples. Mrs. Oliver’s penchant for eating apples, meanwhile, is disrupted by seeing Joyce killed after the innocent bobbing game. The reference to Mrs. Oliver’s love of the fruit reinforces Christie’s tongue-in-cheek characterization of Mrs. Oliver as an analogue for the author herself, as both real and fictional mystery authors were famously fond of the fruit (“Who Is Ariadne Oliver? A Fact File.” Agatha Christie, 13 Sept. 2023). Mrs. Oliver finds, however, that she loses her taste for the fruit as she begins to associate them with the idea of a murdered child. Christie’s use of biblical allusion to parallel Quarry Garden and the Garden of Eden extends the motif’s symbolism to temptation and a loss of innocence.
The Codicil
The codicil to Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe’s will acts primarily as a plot device, one that plays with the different conventions of the detective novel genre. The novel ultimately contains two codicils with nearly the same content: One is real and bequeaths the bulk of Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe’s fortune to Olga Seminoff, leaving nothing for her niece, Mrs. Drake. The second makes the same dispersal of assets but is obviously forged. Michael is ultimately revealed to have commissioned this poor forgery specifically to cast doubt on Olga’s claim to the money, given his scheme to obtain the funds via his relationship with the widowed Mrs. Drake.
The codicil’s legitimacy offers clues to readers, even as its shifting nature makes these clues difficult to parse. The document’s initial introduction as a forgery commissioned as part of an inheritance scam positions it as a red herring, as the estate of a woman who is several years dead has no clear immediate connection to the death of a child at a party. As the novel continues, however, the codicil is revealed as a false clue not to the reader, but to Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe’s lawyers—which makes it a legitimate clue to readers regarding how they should see Joyce’s murder as intertwined with the mysterious past of Woodleigh Common. This shift between who the codicil confounds (from readers to characters) parallels the arc of the detective novel—in which readers should gradually become closer to the detective in understanding, as they are led through the plot with clues and hints, but in which they are unlikely to know the full scope of the mystery until the detective explains all.
Quarry Garden
Quarry Garden is a frequent setting in Hallowe’en Party, and one that is crucial to the plot; Michael and Mrs. Drake hide their first victim’s body in a well in the garden, which Miranda witnesses. Later, the garden takes on increasingly symbolic resonance, one that is tied up in allusion. Miranda’s penchant for sitting quietly in the garden and watching nature, for example, ties her to a Romantic archetype of childhood innocence as connected to the natural world.
Similarly, Michael’s command that Poirot take his police work and worldly concerns out of the beautiful garden leads the detective to compare Michael to Satan. Thus, Christie ties Quarry Garden to the religious imagery of Garden of Eden in the Christian tradition. Miranda becomes the innocent in the garden, while Michael becomes the serpent tempting her away from innocent appreciation of beauty. Like the serpent leading Adam and Eve into temptation in the Biblical Book of Genesis, Michael lures Miranda away from her mother to the standing stones. The reveal that he intends to kill her is, like the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis, marks the end of her innocence.
Extensive attachment to gardens is likewise presented as dangerous in the novel. Michael’s obsession with natural beauty leads him to a kind of “madness,” which permits him to convince himself that the murders he commits are necessary. Gardens do not, therefore, emerge as an untroubled connection to innocence in a desirable way. Rather, the novel contends, admiration for the beauty of the natural world is commendable, but not at the expense of human life.
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By Agatha Christie
