Crooked House is a work of detective fiction

Detective fiction

Detective fiction is a sub-genre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator , either professional or amateur, investigates a crime, often murder.-In ancient literature:...

 by Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie

Dame Agatha Christie DBE was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections , and her successful West End plays.According to...

 first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company

Dodd, Mead and Company

Dodd, Mead and Company was one of the pioneer publishing houses of the United States, based in New York City. Under several names, the firm operated from 1839 until 1990. Its history properly began in 1870, with the retirement of its founder, Moses Woodruff Dodd. Control passed to his son Frank...

 in March 1949

1949 in literature

The year 1949 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Arthur C. Clarke becomes Assistant Editor of Science Abstracts.*Bertrand Russell receives the Order of Merit....

 and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club

Collins Crime Club

The Collins Crime Club was an imprint of UK book publishers William Collins & Co Ltd and ran from May 6, 1930 to April 1994. Customers registered their name and address with the club and were sent a newsletter every three months which advised them of the latest books which had been or were to be...

 on May 23 of the same year. The US edition retailed at $

Dollar sign

The dollar or peso sign is a symbol primarily used to indicate the various peso and dollar units of currency around the world.- Origin :...

2.50 and the UK edition at eight shillings and sixpence

British sixpence coin

The sixpence, known colloquially as the tanner, or half-shilling, was a British pre-decimal coin, worth six pence, or 1/40th of a pound sterling....

 (8/6).

The action takes place in and near London in the autumn of 1947

1947 in literature

The year 1947 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*The Diary of Anne Frank is published for the first time.*Jack Kerouac makes the journey which he will later chronicle in his book On the Road....

. Christie has said that this was one of her two favourites of her own works, the other being Ordeal by Innocence

Ordeal by Innocence

Ordeal by Innocence is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on November 3 1958 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company the following year. The UK edition retailed at twelve shillings and sixpence and the US edition at $2.95...

.

Explanation of the novel's title

The title is a reference to a nursery rhyme

Nursery rhyme

The term nursery rhyme is used for "traditional" poems for young children in Britain and many other countries, but usage only dates from the 19th century and in North America the older ‘Mother Goose Rhymes’ is still often used.-Lullabies:...

 ("There Was a Crooked Man

There Was a Crooked Man

There Was a Crooked Man is a nursery rhyme. The phrase can also refer to:*There Was a Crooked Man..., a 1970 western film starring Kirk Douglas and Henry Fonda*There Was a Crooked Man , featuring Norman Wisdom...

"), a common theme of Christie's.

Plot introduction

Three generations of the Anglo-Greek Leonides family live together in a large, seemingly crooked house, under the patriarchy of Aristide. He is an ageing millionaire who originally moved to England from Smyrna

Smyrna

Smyrna was an ancient city located at a central and strategic point on the Aegean coast of Anatolia. Thanks to its advantageous port conditions, its ease of defence and its good inland connections, Smyrna rose to prominence. The ancient city is located at two sites within modern İzmir, Turkey...

 and, in the novel, spends his remaining days in the company of his second wife Brenda, fifty years his junior. After the old man is poisoned with his own eye medicine (eserine), his granddaughter Sophia tells her fiancé Charles Hayward, the story's first person narrator, that she can't marry him until the killer is apprehended; so, desperate for her hand in marriage, he begins his own investigation...

Plot summary

The first person narrator

Narrator

A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...

 is Charles Hayward who, towards the end of the Second World War, occupies some post in Cairo

Cairo

Cairo , is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the 16th largest metropolitan area in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life...

. There he meets Sophia Leonides, a smart, successful young Englishwoman who works for the Foreign Office. They fall in love, but put off getting engaged until after the end of the war when they will be reunited in England.

Hayward returns home only to find an obituary in The Times

The Times

The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

: 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.
When the autopsy reveals that Aristide Leonides has been poisoned with his own eserine-based eye medicine via an insulin

Insulin

Insulin is a hormone central to regulating carbohydrate and fat metabolism in the body. Insulin causes cells in the liver, muscle, and fat tissue to take up glucose from the blood, storing it as glycogen in the liver and muscle....

 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

Conscientious objector

A conscientious objector is an "individual who has claimed the right to refuse to perform military service" on the grounds of freedom of thought, conscience, and/or religion....

 who has been living in the house as private tutor to Eustace and Josephine, Sophia's younger brother and sister. Rumour has it that Brenda and Laurence have been carrying on an illicit love affair right under old Leonides's nose. All 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. When police interviews fail to turn up a clear suspect, Charles agrees to help his father, an Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard

Scotland Yard

Scotland Yard is a metonym for the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service of London, UK. It derives from the location of the original Metropolitan Police headquarters at 4 Whitehall Place, which had a rear entrance on a street called Great Scotland Yard. The Scotland Yard entrance became...

, 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 everyone knew that Aristide's eye medicine was poisonous. Moreover, according to the will of record, they all stand to gain a healthy bequest from the old man's estate. Aside from this, the family members have little in common. Edith de Haviland, Aristide's unmarried sister-in-law, is a repressed, somewhat bitter woman who came to stay with him after his first wife's death in order to supervise his children's upbringing. Roger, the eldest son and always Aristide's favourite, is a failure as businessman and has steered the catering business bestowed to him by his father to the brink of bankruptcy; he longs to live a simple life somewhere far away. Roger's wife Clemency, a scientist with austere tastes, has never been able to enjoy the wealth offered by her husband's family. Philip, Roger's younger brother, has suffered all his life 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 of the house. Philip's wife Magda is a modestly successful actress to whom everything, even a murder in the family, is a stage show in which she wants to play a leading part. Sixteen-year-old Eustace still suffers from the aftereffects of a mild case of polio, but otherwise is an average sort of boy. His twelve-year-old sister Josephine, on the other hand, is ugly, odd, precociously intelligent, and so obsessed with detective stories that she spies continually on the rest of the household, writing down her observations in a secret notebook.

Things get complicated when it is revealed that Leonides secretly redrafted his will to leave everything to Sophia because he believed that only she had the strength of character to assume his place as the head of the family. Next, Josephine–who has been bragging that she knows the killer's identity–is found lying in the yard, unconscious from a severe blow to the head from a marble doorstop. At this point, Charles discovers a cache of incriminating love letters from Brenda to Laurence, and the two are arrested. While they are in custody, however, the children's nanny dies after drinking a digitalis

Digitalis

Digitalis is a genus of about 20 species of herbaceous perennials, shrubs, and biennials that are commonly called foxgloves. This genus was traditionally placed in the figwort family Scrophulariaceae, but recent reviews of phylogenetic research have placed it in the much enlarged family...

-laced cup of cocoa

Hot chocolate

Hot chocolate is a heated beverage typically consisting of shaved chocolate, melted chocolate or cocoa powder, heated milk or water, and sugar...

 that had apparently been intended for Josephine, and the family realizes that the killer is still among them.

Ending

Charles, afraid for Josephine's life, tries in vain to induce her to tell him the murderer's name. Afterwards, Edith de Haviland invites the girl to come out with her in the car for an ice cream soda—then drives over a cliff. Both die instantly.

Back at Three Gables, Charles finds two letters from de Haviland: one is a suicide note for Chief Inspector Taverner confessing to the murders of Aristide, the nanny, and Josephine. The other letter, intended for Charles's eyes only, reveals the truth of the matter - Josephine is the murderer. As proof, de Haviland has enclosed the child's secret notebook, the first line of which reads "To-day I killed grandfather." It is revealed that she committed the murder simply because her grandfather wouldn't pay for her ballet lessons; she then revelled in all the attention she received afterwards and planned her own assault with the marble doorstop as a way of diverting attention. She poisoned Nannie for encouraging Magda to send her to Switzerland, and also because she despised her for calling her a 'silly little girl'. Edith discovered Josephine's notebook hidden in a dog kennel, and killed them both because she didn't want her to suffer when the police discovered the truth.

Characters in Crooked House

• Charles Hayward, fiancé to Sophia Leonides
• Sophia Leonides, daughter of Magda and Philip Leonides, granddaughter of Aristide
• Brenda Leonides, the spoiled young widow of Aristide Leonides
• Magda West, a glamorous stage actress
• Edith de Haviland, Sophia's elderly great-aunt
• Roger Leonides, son of Aristide
• Clemency Leonides, his wife, a scientist
• Philip Leonides, Magda's husband and Roger's brother
• Laurence Brown, teacher to Josephine and Eustace
• Josephine Leonides, Magda's 12-year-old daughter
• Eustace Leonides, her older brother
• Janet "Nannie" Rowe, the nanny of the Leonides children
• Chief Inspector Taverner, the inspector who tries to solve the case

Literary significance and reception

No review of this book appeared in the Times Literary Supplement.

Maurice Richardson, in the May 29, 1949 issue of The Observer

The Observer

The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...

gave a positive review in comparison to his opinion of Taken at the Flood the previous year: "Her forty-ninth book and one of her best seven. Poisoning of aged iniquitous anglicised Levantine millionaire. Nicely characterised family of suspects. Delicious red herrings. Infinite suspense and shocking surprise finish make up for slight looseness of texture."

An unnamed reviewer in the Toronto Daily Star

Toronto Star

The Toronto Star is Canada's highest-circulation newspaper, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Its print edition is distributed almost entirely within the province of Ontario...

of March 12, 1949 said, "Chief Inspector Taverner of Scotland Yard was as brilliant as usual but barking up the wrong tree - as Agatha Christie demonstrates in a surprise ending which introduces a novel idea in murder mystery."

Robert Barnard

Robert Barnard

Robert Barnard is an English crime writer, critic and lecturer.- Life and work :Born in Essex, Barnard was educated at the Colchester Royal Grammar School and at Balliol College in Oxford....

: "'Pure pleasure' was how the author described the writing of this, which was long planned, and remained one of her favourites. As the title implies, this is a family murder – and a very odd family indeed. The solution, one of the classic ones, was anticipated (but much less effectively) in Margery Allingham

Margery Allingham

Margery Louise Allingham was an English crime writer, best remembered for her detective stories featuring gentleman sleuth Albert Campion.- Childhood and schooling :...

's 'prentice work The White Cottage Mystery."

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

The novel was adapted for BBC Radio 4

BBC Radio 4

BBC Radio 4 is a British domestic radio station, operated and owned by the BBC, that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. The station controller is currently Gwyneth Williams, and the...

 in four weekly 30-minute episodes which began broadcasting on February 29, 2008. It starred Rory Kinnear

Rory Kinnear

Rory Kinnear is an award-winning English actor who has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre.-Early life:...

 (Charles Hayward), Anna Maxwell Martin

Anna Maxwell Martin

Anna Maxwell Martin , sometimes credited as Anna Maxwell-Martin, is a two-time BAFTA award-winning English actress who has won acclaim for her performances as Lyra in His Dark Materials at the Royal National Theatre, as Esther Summerson in the BBC's 2005 adaptation of Bleak House, and as N in...

 (Sophia Leonides), and Phil Davis

Phil Davis

Philip Davis is an English film actor, writer and director who has appeared in many films and television series. He has written and directed various dramas during his career.-Personal life:...

 (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.

American filmmaker Neil La Bute has announced that he will direct a feature film version, for 2012, of the novel with a script by Julian Fellowes

Julian Fellowes

Julian Alexander Kitchener-Fellowes, Baron Fellowes of West Stafford, DL , known as Julian Fellowes, is an English actor, novelist, film director and screenwriter, as well as a Conservative peer.-Early life:...

. On 15th May 2011, Gemma Arterton

Gemma Arterton

Gemma Arterton is an English actress. She played the eponymous protagonist in the BBC adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and starred in the feature films St Trinian's, the James Bond film Quantum of Solace, Clash of the Titans, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Tamara...

, Matthew Goode

Matthew Goode

Matthew William Goode is an English actor. His notable films have included Match Point, Watchmen, Brideshead Revisited, Leap Year, Imagine Me and You and A Single Man.-Early life:...

, Gabriel Byrne

Gabriel Byrne

Gabriel James Byrne is an Irish actor, film director, film producer, writer, cultural ambassador and audiobook narrator. His acting career began in the Focus Theatre before he joined Londo's Royal Court Theatre in 1979. Byrne's screen debut came in the Irish soap opera The Riordans and the...

 and Julie Andrews

Julie Andrews

Dame Julia Elizabeth Andrews, DBE is an English film and stage actress, singer, and author. She is the recipient of Golden Globe, Emmy, Grammy, BAFTA, People's Choice Award, Theatre World Award, Screen Actors Guild and Academy Award honors...

 were announced to lead the cast.

Publication history

• 1949, Dodd Mead and Company (New York), March 1949, Hardback, 211 pp
• 1949, Collins Crime Club (London), May 23, 1949, Hardback, 192 pp
• 1951, Pocket Books
  Pocket Books
  Pocket Books is a division of Simon & Schuster that primarily publishes paperback books.- History :Pocket produced the first mass-market, pocket-sized paperback books in America in early 1939 and revolutionized the publishing industry...
  
   (New York), Paperback, (Pocket number 753), 200 pp
• 1953, Penguin Books
  Penguin Books
  Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...
  
  , Paperback, (Penguin number 925), 191 pp
• 1959, Fontana Books (Imprint of HarperCollins
  HarperCollins
  HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...
  
  ), Paperback, 191 pp
• 1967, Greenway edition of collected works (William Collins), Hardcover, 223 pp
• 1967, Greenway edition of collected works (Dodd Mead), Hardcover, 223 pp
• 1991, Ulverscroft Large-print Edition, Hardcover, ISBN 0-70-892419-0

A condensed version of the novel was first published in the US in Cosmopolitan

Cosmopolitan (magazine)

Cosmopolitan is an international magazine for women. It was first published in 1886 in the United States as a family magazine, was later transformed into a literary magazine and eventually became a women's magazine in the late 1960s...

magazine in the issue for October 1948 (Volume 125, Number 4) with an illustration by Grushkin.

In the UK the novel was first serialised in the weekly magazine John Bull

John Bull (magazine)

John Bull Magazine was a weekly periodical established in the City, London EC4, by Theodore Hook in 1820.-Publication dates:It was a popular periodical that continued in production through 1824 and at least until 1957...

in seven abridged instalments from April 23 (Volume 85, Number 2234) to June 4, 1949 (Volume 85, Number 2240) with illustrations by Alfred Sindall.

External links

• Crooked House at the official Agatha Christie website