A Hallowe'en Party/A Haunting in Venice (1969)

by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie’s books are constantly being turned into movies and TV series, and 2023 is no exception. British actor Kenneth Branagh is back as her Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, for a third time. The movie is called A Haunting in Venice and the book it’s based on A Hallowe’en Party, one of the later Christies, written when she was 78. It’s set in the English countryside at a children’s party, where apple bobbing goes horribly wrong. It features Ariadne Oliver, Poirot’s scatty writer friend, as a main character. As you would expect from Christie, it has a clever plot. In bookstores, you may see a special edition of the book, with a foreword by screenwriter Michael Green, who admits to having committed his own crime while writing the screenplay for the film: “I confess I stole that sparkling ingenious premise — a murder at a Halloween Party — and killed the rest.”