If a woman were the head of Scotland Yard…
Ariadne Oliver appears in a total of 8 books and not only in Poirot stories. The writer is Agatha Christie’s own caricature, Ariadne’s detective Sven Hjerson represents Poirot, towards whom Ariadne has the same kind of ambivalent feelings as Agatha Christie has towards her most famous detective. The Finnish detective, who is a fictional character of a fictional character, was recently made into a series under the title Agatha Christie’s Hjerson, which moves the story to present-day Sweden.
Mrs. Oliver first appears in a story in the Parker Pyne Investigates short story collection and is mentioned in one other story. (Interestingly, Miss Lemon, Poirot’s secretary, also appears alongside Pyne first.) She then investigates with Poirot in the Cards on the Table, Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, and the Dead Man’s Folly, and then appears alone in The Pale Horse. She then accompanies Poirot again towards the end of his life in several investigations, including the Third Girl, Hallowe’en Party, and Elephants Can Remember.
In the story of Cards on the Table, she mentions one of her books, The Body in the Library, which Agatha Christie later used as a title for a Miss Marple story. Ariadne sometimes takes an active part in the investigation herself, or finds herself accidentally close to a murder as in Mrs McGinty’s Dead, or she discovers that something is wrong and informs Poirot about it as in Dead Man’s Folly. In this story, the writer is asked to invent the plot of a treasure hunt-like murder game, which turns out to be so twisted that she later writes a book about it, The Woman in the Trees. In The Pale Horse, she helps a fellow writer unravel a complicated crime and provides very important information. She herself is in danger in the case of The Third Girl. She also investigates with Poirot after a Halloween party gone wrong, and then accompanies the detective on his penultimate investigation.
