“I saw a murder once…I did…I did see a murder. I did. I did. I didn’t know it was a murder when I saw it. It wasn’t really till a long time afterwards, I mean, that I began to know that it was a murder. Something that somebody said only about a month or two ago suddenly made me think: Of course, that was a murder I saw.”
Joyce Reynolds is a thirteen-year-old girl with a reputation for making up stories, embellishing the truth, and having an overactive imagination. The story begins during preparations for a Halloween party to which famous mystery writer Ariadne Oliver has been invited. Joyce has just dismissed to her face Oliver’s latest offering, criticizing it for not being bloody enough as she prefers mystery tales that are a bit more gruesome. Everybody else in attendance dismisses Joyce’s insistent claims to have once witnessed some mysterious event that only lately did the young girl even come to realize was a murder. This quote serves the literary purpose of foreshadowing as well fueling the plot itself. Not long afterward, young Joyce is herself found dead in a bucket used for apple-bobbing.
“A child boasts of having witnessed a murder. Only a few hours later, that child is dead. You must admit that there are grounds for believing that it might—it’s a far-fetched idea perhaps—but it might have been cause and effect. If so, somebody lost no time.”
That Joyce winds up dead not long after several people hear her insistence upon having once witnessed a murder is thus the fuel which powers the subsequent investigation of not just Joyce’s murder, but whether she was killed to cover up a previous murder. The famous Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is called in by his friend Ariadne to investigate this highly unusual murder of a child at a Halloween party. One might well jump to the conclusion based on Poirot’s assessment of the likelihood of the murder of Joyce being connected to her wild story of having witnessed a murder earlier in her life that this is one of the author’s earlier books published in the 1920s or 1930s. In fact, it was published in 1969. By that time, Poirot’s characterization of the events as being far-fetched seems a bit quaint. Unlike the period when Christie first began writing, by the time this novel was published there had been enough notorious and infamous child murders to make the crime a far less shocking and disturbing example of extreme deviance. Or, then again, this quote could merely be a demonstration of Poirot’s noted reliance on the psychology of misleading potential suspects with intentionally false observations.
“Personally I consider myself that there must be what I call an outside significance to this. Someone walked into the house—not a difficult thing to do under the circumstances—someone of highly disturbed mentality, I suppose, the kind of people who are let out of mental homes simply because there is no room for them there, as far as I can see.”
The Halloween party is being held at the home of Mrs. Drake. She is a woman with a prominent position within the community and Poirot correctly identifies her as being far more upset about the social aspect of the murder of a young girl taking place than the murder itself. She castigates parents for the rising permissiveness which has contributed to the increasing number of children winding up dead, but instantly takes the old-fashioned perspective that any such act committed among people she knows personally must be the act of a lunatic. This is what she means by “outside significance” capable of sneaking into a good home like hers. This had been the prevailing perspective of most of the population when Christie began writing her murder mysteries. One person who did not share the idea that such inhumane acts can only be committed by those mentally disturbed enough to warrant being put into an asylum is the author herself. She was one of the progenitors of the murder mystery novel that took killers out the dark shadows of the underworld and placed them into cozy little British villages. Ultimately, the murderer of little Joyce is not determined to be an escapee from a mental institution who managed to somehow make their way into the seemingly protective confines of Mrs. Drake’s upscale home.
