Crooked House is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in March 1949 and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on 23 May of the same year.
The action takes place in and near London in the autumn of 1947. Christie said the titles of this novel and Ordeal by Innocence were her favourites amongst her own works.
Title meaning
The title refers to a nursery rhyme ("There Was a Crooked Man"), a common theme of the author. Narrator Charles's fiancée Sophia says it refers not to dishonesty, but rather "we hadn't been able to grow up independent... twisted and twining", meaning unhealthily interdependent on the intensely strong personality of the family patriarch, Aristide Leonides.
Plot introduction
Three generations of the Leonides family live together under wealthy patriarch Aristide. His first wife Marcia died; her sister Edith has cared for the household since then. His second wife is the indolent Brenda, decades his junior, suspected of having a clandestine love affair with Laurence, the grandchildren's tutor. After Aristide is poisoned by his own eye medicine (eserine), his granddaughter Sophia tells narrator and fiancé Charles Hayward that they cannot marry until the killer is apprehended. Charles's father, "The Old Man", is Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, so Charles investigates from the inside along with assigned detective Chief Inspector Taverner.
Plot summary
Towards the end of the Second World War, Charles Hayward is in Cairo and falls in love with Sophia Leonides, a smart, successful Englishwoman who works for the Foreign Office. They put off getting engaged until the end of the war when they will be reunited in England.
Hayward returns home and reads a death notice in The Times: Sophia's grandfather, the wealthy entrepreneur Aristide Leonides, has died, aged 85. Due to the war, the whole family has been living with him in a sumptuous but ill-proportioned house called "Three Gables", the crooked house of the title. The autopsy reveals that Leonides was poisoned with his own eserine-based eye medicine via an insulin injection. Sophia tells Charles that she can't marry him until the matter is cleared up.
The obvious suspects are Brenda Leonides, Aristide's much younger second wife, and Laurence Brown, a conscientious objector who has been living in the house as private tutor to Sophia's younger brother and sister, Eustace and Josephine. They are rumoured to have been carrying on an illicit love affair under old Leonides's nose. The family members hope these two prove to be the murderers because they despise Brenda as a gold digger and also hope to escape the scandal that a different outcome would bring. Charles agrees to help his father, an assistant commissioner of Scotland Yard, to investigate the crime. He becomes a house guest at Three Gables, hoping that someone might reveal a clue at an unguarded moment.
All the family members had motive and opportunity, none has an alibi; and each of them knew that Aristide's eye medicine was poisonous as he had told all the family after being asked by Josephine. According to the will, they all stand to gain a healthy bequest from the old man's estate. The servants do not get bequests but would lose their (increasing) annual wages or bonuses, so are not suspects. Aside from this, the family members have little in common. Edith de Haviland, Aristide's unmarried sister-in-law, is a brusque woman in her 70s who came to stay with him after his first wife's death to supervise his children's upbringing. Roger, the eldest son and Aristide's favourite, is a failure as a businessman. He has steered the catering business bestowed to him by his father to the brink of bankruptcy and he longs to live a simple life somewhere far away. Roger's wife Clemency, a scientist with austere and unsentimental tastes, has never been able to enjoy the wealth offered by her husband's family. Roger's younger brother, Philip, has suffered under his father's preference for Roger, and retreated into a distant world of books and bygone historical epochs, spending all his waking hours in the library. Philip's wife Magda is an only moderately successful actress to whom everything, even a family murder, is a stage show in which she wants to play a leading part. Sixteen-year-old Eustace has polio. He is handsome and intelligent, yet embittered by his disability. His twelve-year-old sister Josephine, on the other hand, is ugly, precociously intelligent, and obsessed with detective stories. She spies continually on the rest of the household, letting everyone know that she is writing down her observations in a secret notebook.