Hallowe'en Party

Figured I'd get it read before Branagh's movie comes out. It's supposedly based on this book, but the trailer bears no resemblance to the book whatsoever, with its seances and supernatural goings on and its Venice setting.

The premise is a cracking one. Talk at a party comes around to murder and a 13 year old girl mentions that she once witnessed a murder. Nobody believes her but an hour later, she's found head down in a bucket permanently bobbing for apples. This is Christie in her later years so she seems to shoehorn some of her own moaning in whenever she can. She has four different characters mention apropos of nothing that “they don't keep mental patients locked up anymore, they just send them home these days to live in the community”. The talk of the killer potentially being “some mentally disturbed person” who walked into the party and spotted an opportunity occurs so much that you would think it must have some relevance to the outcome. Characters also complain more than once of mothers not raising their children right anymore, children getting into cars with strangers and long haired young men smashing up phone boxes for the hell of it. Though she does have the good sense to have a dialogue between teenage boys and immediately start off by saying they had a very adult manner and if you closed your eyes you might think it was two elderly gentlemen speaking. Nobody wants to read Agatha Christie's attempts at 60s youth slang.

Quite a dull read overall with Poirot plodding around repeatedly asking characters the same questions like a Broken Sword game - “And what did you think of the young girl who was murdered?” “What do you know about the foreign girl who disappeared a few years ago?” etc. In the end, the mystery and its reveal weren't particularly interesting. I'm not sure the motives of the killer fully make sense but I'm also past the point of thinking about it too much.