Hercule Poirot
The detective enlisted to investigate the murders at the heart of this mystery is a Belgian named Hercule Poirot. Poirot is, along with Miss Marple, a character who recurs in a number of the author’s stories and has attained a level of familiarity just below that of legendary Sherlock Holmes. He is immediately identifiable physically because of his prominent upturned mustache.
Like most literary detectives, Poirot’s stock in trade is questioning witnesses and potential suspects rather than engaging in advanced forensic investigations. Rather than relying on evidence to arrive at a conclusion, Poirot does not just interview everybody at the Halloween party of the title, but gauges them psychologically. Throughout the novel, he both poses direct questions and takes note of behavior, inconsistencies, and actions which seem inconsequential to others but carry significant importance to him.
One unusual aspect of this novel relative to its genre is that during the investigation of murders committed in the present-day, Poirot decides to re-investigate a few unsolved murders which he thinks may be connected. A typical murder mystery, especially one involving such a famous character, would result with this decision leading to identifying the murderers. Poirot’s investigative technique winds up not just finding no connection, but not pursuing the cases further to determine who might be the killer operating in the past.
Joyce Reynolds
Joyce is a thirteen-year-old girl who opens the story by claiming that she had once witnessed a murder. Then she goes on to explain that she didn’t say anything at the time because she didn’t understand what she had seen. It was only later that she realized that what she had witnessed was a murder.
Nobody believes Joyce’s story and immediately dismisses her claim. This is because Joyce has already, at such a young age, developed a reputation known by many as a fabulist. She is a teller of lies and invents stories to draw attention to herself.
Poirot does not immediately dismiss the idea, however, that Joyce’s propensity for making up stories is not connected to her own death. Poirot is called to the scene precisely for the purpose of investigating the horrifying scene found at the Halloween party. She lies drowned in the tub of water used for the game of bobbing for apples.
Rowena Drake
It is at the upper-class home of Rowena Drake that the Halloween party is being held at which Joyce is found drowned. Rowena’s wealthy aunt, Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe suddenly died recently, and a scandal of sorts erupted when it was discovered that a codicil to her will indicated that Olga Seminoff, an au pair, had become an unexpected beneficiary. Upon discovering that this codicil was a forgery, Poirot turns his suspicions away from Joyce’s story and to the more reliable motive of money.
During one of Poirot’s interviews, a schoolteacher named Elizabeth Whittaker claims that she saw Rowena drop a vase filled with water after witnessing something surprising going on in the library. She claims that there could not have been anything in the library to cause this action and cannot explain what caused Rowena to drop the vase. Poirot finds this especially interesting.
Poirot later learns that the codicil had not been forged. Olga actually was to receive part of the inheritance. Rowena’s aunt made this change to punish her niece for carrying on with another man while she was married.
Michael Garfield
Michael Garfield is a gardener and the man with whom Rowena was carrying on her affair. Garfield is very narcissistic and a strange sort of aesthete. Gardening is the medium through which he pursues an especially odd obsession.
Garfield dreams of creating a beautiful garden on a Greek island. He becomes single-minded in this obsession artistically but lacks the financial means by which to make it a reality. He also has a daughter named Miranda with whom he has a very bizarre, though not sexual, relationship.
At one point, Poirot stops to spend an unexpected amount of time musing over the fact that Michael Garfield is beautiful and what it might mean to find a man beautiful. Disregarding any homosexual subtext, this observation of the gardener by the detective is essential to developing Garfield’s character. He is a man who indulges an idiosyncratic connection to ancient Greek myths and the ability to use gardening as a means of making that connection concrete.
