Hallowe'en Party

Hallowe'en Party was published in the United Kingdom by the Collins Crime Club in November 1969 and in the United States by Dodd, Mead and Company later the same year. It is dedicated to P. G. Wodehouse, and it is one of the Poirot novels written in Christie's last decade, a period in which the books became shorter and the tone more elegiac. Ariadne Oliver is generally read as Christie's affectionate self-portrait as a mystery novelist, and her appearances in the series are a running joke about plot construction.

The novel is a village mystery with a small cast: the children at the party, their parents, the schoolteachers and the neighbours who were present on the evening. Poirot's method here is his usual one, which is to talk to everybody and to take what people say about each other more seriously than what they say about the case. The clue that resolves it is a memory, and the book's structure withholds the relevant conversation until the reader has been given every opportunity to notice it.

The novel was adapted as a Poirot television film in 2010 with David Suchet, and it was a basis for a later film adaptation directed by Kenneth Branagh. It is a standalone within the Poirot series, which by 1969 had been running for fifty years, and it can be read without any of the others. It is a village mystery with a school, a church and a set of parents who all grew up together, and the detective spends most of the book listening to them talk about each other.