Crooked House

Product Information

There's Sophia's father, Philip, impassive and removed from the drama of his wife. Then there's Uncle Roger, an emotional gentle giant: "He collided with a screen, said 'I beg your pardon' to it in a flustered manner, and went out of the room. It was rather like the exit of a bumble bee and left a noticeable silence behind it." The novel was adapted for BBC Radio 4 in four weekly 30-minute episodes which began broadcasting on 29 February 2008. It starred Rory Kinnear (Charles Hayward), Anna Maxwell Martin (Sophia Leonides), and Phil Davis (Chief Insp. Taverner). The radio play was dramatised by Joy Wilkinson and directed by Sam Hoyle. It was subsequently issued on CD. This version removed the character of Eustace. 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. 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.

Crooked House is actually quite dark for an Agatha Christie tale. Everyone in the household is a suspect, has a motive, and the opportunity. Suspicion naturally falls upon the elderly man's young and beautiful widow who is, supposedly, enamoured with the tutor. But that would be fat too easy a solution...... You are a precocious child in a complicated world filled with scheming relatives & heirs to fortune & smitten suitors & gold-digging wives & husky tutors & cast-out sons & amateur sleuths. Your life is centered within a vast country manor dominated by your dread grandfather, who sits like a senescent spider in the center of his enormous web, a web whose tangles he created but no longer bothers to repair. Then murder strikes and grandfather is no more! What is a young girl to do? How long will your little flame burn in such a bleak and venomous environment? Never fear, tiny dancer, you are wise beyond your years... but what path shall you choose? It's a tightly woven plot for sure but with what I thought was really quite convoluted storytelling. So it's unfortunate that I struggled to really engage with this one. The narratives kept constantly changing with no clear distinction, timeframes changed just as constantly. So it would either be in the past to that tragic night or in the present again with little distinction whilst reading. I found it a strange way of writing and it just didn't flow for me at all. It felt really disjointed and, if I'm honest, hard work. There was a large cast of characters, and I would often forget who was who and had nothing to refer to as I was reading an ebook. Even the placement and settings did nothing much for me. It was well described and all felt suitably bleak in the small costal village with vivid descriptions of marshes, crumbled houses and muddy shorelines.

Despite Christie’s love for the book, Crooked House isn’t nearly as well known as many of her works, such as Murder on the Orient Express. The reason for this relative obscurity may well be that Crooked House does not feature either of Christie’s two famous detectives, Hercule Poirot or Miss Jane Marple. Instead, the narrator is Charles Hayward a diplomat who spent the war overseas and has just rekindled his romance with Sophia, the granddaughter of the dead businessman. Because Hayward’s father is a police officer, he is asked to stay at the house for a while and talk to the various witnesses in hopes of finding a clue.

As in all Christie's best mysteries, tension builds slowly, as first one suspect is presented, than another, and then eliminated. The additional emotional connection of the relationship between Charles and Sophia adds a delicate layer to the investigation--is he there as a prospective in-law, or a police official? The struggle to solve the murder is also a struggle to resolve their relationship. Family secrets will be brought into the open. Aristide's will reveals a surprising bequest. Failures will need to be faced. Before all is over, there will be another attempt at murder and arrest or two. Mother," said Sophia, coming through the open door, "you're not to tell the Inspector a lot of lies." What results is a building that is rather dizzying to look at but comes complete with a fascinating history. Don’t let the gravity defying appearance fool you, this store is a popular tourist attraction with visitors travelling far and wide to take a peek inside. The action takes place in and near London in the autumn of 1947. Christie said this and Ordeal by Innocence were her favorites among her own works.

Join the conversation

The Crooked House is just that, an odd looking house set in a small community, a setting which breeds secrets, half-truths and rumours, and best of all, a distrust of anyone from ‘outside.’ Has this community really been able to mask the truth for so many years not just about Alison but the other tragedies that surfaced around the same time. Who are the unseen watchers, who wants the stories supressed? As we meet the different characters they all have part of the tale to tell, nothing is quite straightforward and yet all these different strands build a picture of what really happened in the Crooked House over time. This best-selling author of all time wrote 66 crime novels and story collections, fourteen plays, and six novels under a pseudonym in romance. Her books sold more than a billion copies in the English language and a billion in translation. According to Index Translationum, people translated her works into 103 languages at least, the most for an individual author. Of the most enduring figures in crime literature, she created Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple. She atuhored The Mousetrap, the longest-running play in the history of modern theater. One brother, one sister, a mother, a father, an uncle, an aunt by marriage, a grandfather, a great-aunt, and a step-grandmother.'