Ariadne Oliver  

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Ariadne Oliver is a fictional character in the novels of Agatha Christie. She is a mystery novelist and a friend of Hercule Poirot. She often claims to be endowed with particular "feminine intuition," but it usually leads her astray.

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In Cards on the Table, Mrs Oliver is fully described as Mrs. Ariadne Oliver was extremely well known as one of the foremost writers of detective and other sensational stories. She wrote chatty (if not particularly grammatical) articles on The Tendency of the Criminal; Famous Crimes Passion-nels; Murder for Love v. Murder for Gain. She was also a hot-headed feminist, and when any murder of importance was occupying space in the Press there was sure to be an interview with Mrs. Oliver, and it was mentioned that Mrs. Oliver had said, 'Now ifa woman were the head of Scotland Yard!' She was an earnest believer in woman's intuition.

For the rest she was an agreeable woman of middle age, handsome in a rather untidy fashion with fine eyes, substantial shoulders and a large quantity of rebellious grey hair with which she was continually experimenting. One day her appearance would be highly intellectual--a brow with the hair scraped back from it and coiled in a large bun in the neck--on another Mrs. Oliver would suddenly appear with Madonna loops, or large masses of slightly untidy curls. On this particular evening Mrs. Oliver was trying out a fringe.

Mrs. Oliver often assists Poirot in his cases through her knowledge of the criminal mind. She often claims to be endowed with particular "feminine intuition," but it usually leads her astray. She is particularly fond of apples, which becomes a plot point in the novel Hallowe'en Party.

In the books, Oliver's most famous works are those featuring her vegetarian Finn detective Sven Hjerson. Since she knows nothing of Finland, Oliver frequently laments Hjerson's existence. In many of her appearances, Oliver — and her feelings toward Hjerson — reflect Agatha Christie's own frustrations as an author, particularly with the Belgian Hercule Poirot (an example of self-insertion). The self-caricature has also been used to discuss Christie's own follies in her earlier novels. For instance, in Mrs McGinty's Dead, Mrs. Oliver talks of having made the blowpipe a foot long in one of her novels, whereas the actual length is something like four and half feet – the same mistake Christie made in Death in the Clouds.

In The Pale Horse, Mrs. Oliver is acquainted with the Rev. and Mrs. Dane Colthrop, who are also friends of Miss Marple (as seen in The Moving Finger) — thus establishing that Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot exist in the same world. In Cards on the Table, there is a reference to Mrs. Oliver's book The Body in the Library; this title was used by Christie six years later, for a novel featuring Miss Marple.

Books by Ariadne Oliver and by a number of other fictitious mystery writers are discussed by the characters in the Poirot novel The Clocks (1963).

Like Christie, she is a member of Detection Club. Christie even thought of placing a murder at the Club with Oliver being one of the suspects/detective but it came to nothing. (Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks edited by John Curran).

Ariadne Oliver also makes an appearance in Agatha Christie's book "Elephants Can Remember".

In a short piece in John Bull Magazine in 1956, Christie was quoted as saying, "I never take my stories from real life, but the character of Ariadne Oliver does have a strong dash of myself." The author of the article went on to state, "It is perfectly true that sometimes she works at her stories in a large old-fashioned bath, eating apples and depositing the cores on the wide mahogany surround."

Literary function

Even in the one novel in which she appears without Poirot, Mrs. Oliver does not function as a detective, in that she rarely participates in the investigation and contributes only tangentially to the solution. In Cards on the Table she does interview some of the suspects, and in Elephants Can Remember she again interviews witnesses, but none of the essential ones. She is more usually used for comic relief or to provide a deus ex machina through her intuitive or sudden insights, a function that is especially apparent in Third Girl in which she furnishes Poirot with virtually every important clue, or in The Pale Horse, where she discovers the type of poison used to kill the murder victims.

Further functions of Mrs. Oliver are: to enable Christie to discuss overtly the techniques of detective fiction; to contrast the more fanciful apparatuses employed by mystery authors with the apparent realism of her own plots; and to satirise Christie's own experiences and instincts as a writer. Mrs. Oliver therefore serves a range of literary purposes for Christie.

Literary appearances

The true first appearance of Mrs. Oliver was a brief appearance in the short story The Case of the Discontented Soldier which was first published, along with four other stories in the August 1932 issue of the US version of Cosmopolitan magazine (issue number 554) under the sub-heading of Are You Happy? If Not Consult Mr. Parker Pyne. The story first appeared in the UK in issue 614 of Woman's Pictorial on October 15, 1932 and was later published in book form in 1934 as Parker Pyne Investigates (titled Mr. Parker Pyne, Detective in the US). Within this story she appeared as part of Pyne's unorthodox team of freelance assistants. All her subsequent appearances (save one) were in Poirot novels:

Representations in film, television and radio adaptations

The first appearance of Ariadne Oliver on television was in an episode of The Agatha Christie Hour in 1982. In an adaptation of the Parker Pyne story The Case of the Discontented Soldier, she was played by Lally Bowers.

A 1986 adaptation of Dead Man's Folly starred Jean Stapleton as Ariadne Oliver.

Zoë Wanamaker has played Ariadne Oliver in four television episodes of the series Agatha Christie's Poirot starring David Suchet as Hercule Poirot. (Wanamaker also played the part of Letitia Blacklock in the 2005 version of A Murder is Announced for the Marple series starring Geraldine McEwan.)

In the BBC Radio 4 plays, Ariadne Oliver has been played by Stephanie Cole in Cards on the Table and The Pale Horse and more recently by Julia McKenzie in Dead Man's Folly.



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Ariadne Oliver" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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