Hallowe'en Party

Throughout the novel, Agatha Christie uses apples as a recurring motif for danger—a connection internal characters overtly notice. Poirot, for example, notes how Apple Trees, Mrs. Drake’s house, is a fitting site for a murder in which a girl was killed in the bucket used to bob for apples. Mrs. Oliver’s penchant for eating apples, meanwhile, is disrupted by seeing Joyce killed after the innocent bobbing game. The reference to Mrs. Oliver’s love of the fruit reinforces Christie’s tongue-in-cheek characterization of Mrs. Oliver as an analogue for the author herself, as both real and fictional mystery authors were famously fond of the fruit (“Who Is Ariadne Oliver? A Fact File.” Agatha Christie, 13 Sept. 2023). Mrs. Oliver finds, however, that she loses her taste for the fruit as she begins to associate them with the idea of a murdered child. Christie’s use of biblical allusion to parallel Quarry Garden and the Garden of Eden extends the motif’s symbolism to temptation and a loss of innocence.