From Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party to A Haunting in Venice

(left) The edition I purchased in Ireland, 1977; the cast of the movie, 2023.

 

This is not a doctoral thesis, just a game I played to keep up my interest in Agatha Christie's 1969 novel Hallowe'en Party, nominal inspiration for A Haunting in Venice, directed by its star actor Kenneth Branagh. I kept a mental inventory of bits from the novel that went into the movie -- which otherwise has nothing to do with the book.

The premise for the book is pretty good, with some promise of atmosphere. During a community Halloween party at the home of Rowena Drake, a small town's most prominent church lady, an awkward girl has been found dead, head submerged in the tub where kids had bobbed for apples minutes before. The teaser is that the girl had boasted loudly about having once seen a murder "years" before, only she hadn't recognized that it was murder at the time. Hercule Poirot, called into the case by his friend Ariadne Oliver, suspects that someone who overheard the girl has killed her to protect their own secret.

But, as Agatha Christie's novels go, Hallowe'en Party seems pretty tired. The murder has already happened when the novel begins, so forget about rich Halloween atmosphere. The dialogue is freighted with red herrings as people speculate about every disturbance of the past few years that the girl might have witnessed -- most of these dismissed out of hand after we've gone through the tedium of reading about them. An inordinate amount of dialogue contains phrases to the effect, nowadays, (young people, parents, legal officials) are too (coddled and immoral, too indulgent, too merciful) and the murderer is probably (one of the insane people -- addicts, probably -- that indulgent policies have allowed to roam among us). The only thing to stand out here is that the town's foreigner -- Olga Seminoff, nursemaid -- gets some respect, not always the case in Dame Agatha's books.

The movie, on the other hand, goes the other direction, more atmosphere than story. Does Venice even celebrate Halloween? A voiceover narrator says that Venice adopted the holiday from American soldiers recently stationed there at the end of World War II. Poirot is staying in Venice, retired from detective work, when his friend Ariadne Oliver invites him to help her "crack" a local seer's seance routine. The movie makers have fun with dark water, visions of the dead, crashing objects, cobwebs and skulls in tunnels, a legend of orphans left to die in the dungeon during the Plague.

I think the movie's creators also had fun picking little bits of Christie's novel to justify their claim to have "adapted" it. Here's what I picked up:

• Big picture: a Halloween party for kids at the home of a socialite named Rowena Drake.  In the novel, she is a widow whose wealthy mother-in-law died suddenly over a year before.  In the movie, she is an opera singer who hasn't sung since her grown daughter drowned in the canal the previous year.
• Ariadne Oliver, mystery novelist, is present. Her supposed love of apples is referenced several times in both stories. She invites Poirot to get involved.
• An intelligent 11-year-old boy named Leopold knows secrets about the adults in the room.
• A nursemaid named Olga Seminoff is under suspicion.
• A pair of teenagers (both of them boys in the novel, a brother and sister in the movie) rig up some ghostly special effects. The ghostly effects include sightings of spirits in mirrors.
• Someone's head is forced underwater in the tub of bobbing apples. 

For me, the best parts of both the movie and the book are those where Poirot goes on a tear, separating false claims and false theories from what must be true.   Branagh's Poirot goes moping through much of the movie, feeling a bit ill, he says, seeing things that he can't possibly be seeing -- so the moments of clarity were welcome.  

The role of the medium was built up to be a larger-than-life character, one that Michelle Yeoh inhabits with no room to spare.  Young Leopold is another scene-stealer. 

Branagh's other two Christies, based on much stronger novels, made sharper, stronger films; but I do enjoy seeing the grand structure he and his writer Michael Green have fabricated from a few clues left by Dame Agatha.

[See my Crime Fiction page for a curated list of my reflections on other Christie books and movies, including a biography of her and a memoir by the actor who portrayed Poirot for decades, David Suchet.]