Essay Questions

What proclivity of thirteen-year-old Joyce Reynolds characterizes her personality and how does this complicate the investigation of her murder?

During a Halloween party, Joyce is drowned in a tub of water used for the holiday game of bobbing for apples. Just a little earlier, Joyce had blurted out among the adult guests that she had once witnessed a murder but didn’t know she was actually seeing a murder at the time. She meant that it was only later that she came to realize the strange thing she had witnessed was a murder. The natural connection between the possibility of the murderer Joyce had seen also being her own killer instantly occurs to Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, but he is met with resistance by those who knew Joyce. Joyce’s story was dismissed upon hearing it by the adults in the room because the girl had already developed a proclivity toward being a fabulist who liked to make up stories, tell fibs, and otherwise embellish the truth for dramatic effect.

What is the significance of the more than seventy-five references to a garden or gardening over the course of this story?

The very first direct use of the word “garden” does not come until the fifth chapter. The word recurs thirty-five times just in chapter eleven alone. The attentive reader might rightly assume by the midway point of the book that gardens are a significant example of symbolism. In reality, however, the author is placing such heavy emphasis on gardening not just for the sake of metaphor but for a much more concrete purpose. The increasing number of references to gardens from that single first seemingly offhand and unimportant mention in chapter five to the explosion of attention throughout chapter eleven is engaged for multiple literary purposes. The emphasis on gardens is an example of symbolism, foreshadowing, and an integral element of character description designed to intensify the justification behind Poirot’s suspicions of the identity of the murderer.

How does this novel subvert many of the expectations of murder mystery genre?

The whole point of the murder mystery genre in which the detective investigating the case is the central character is that the murderer be identified, and the case be solved. This novel subverts that foundational expectation in several ways. The story actually features more than one murderer going about their felonious business for different reasons. It also features multiple murders, some of which took place before the story begins. The most subversive aspect of the book, however, is that it concludes without identifying the culprit behind some of those killings. In addition, in the case of one major character it is never fully explained whether a death was actually a murder or whether it was merely an unfortunate accident. Arguably the single most subversive element of the story is that it seems to violate an unwritten law of the genre by having the detective investigate two previous unsolved murders that turn out to be entirely unrelated to the case at hand and remain unsolved.