CROOKED HOUSE

Charles Hayward is a young man making his way with a promising career with the foreign office. In a posting to Egypt he meets the beautiful Sophia Leonides and the two fall in love. Charles plans to marry Sophia but the couple decide to give themselves time to see if their feelings for each other are strong enough. After a gap Charles meets Sophia back in London but tragedy has struck the Leonides family as Sophia's grandfather and the family's patriarch Aristide has been found murdered in his house. Sophia feels that until the cloud of suspicion is lifted from the family she cannot marry Charles.

Charles's father is none other than the Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard and along with Chief Inspector Taverner he is sent to the family home in Swinly Dean to see if there are any clues to come to light whilst being "an insider". The family home is a curious building of three separate dwellings comprised into one building, giving it the nick name of "Crooked House". In one part lives Sophia's parents, her remote father Philip, her excitable and effected mother Magda and her sulky brother Eustace and sneaky sister Josephine. Upstairs lives Philip's brother the hearty but incompetent Roger and his wife the cold and calm Clemency.

As far as Sophia's immediate family are concerned the person most likely to have committed the crime is Aristide's second wife Brenda who was 50 years younger than her ex-husband. She is supposedly having an affair with the children's tutor the limp and insipid Lawrence, but to Charles Brenda strikes a very pathetic figure and he suspects the murderer is someone else.

The maze of clues and red herrings is as strong as ever and this book benefits with Charles "the detective" working alongside the police but also having unlimited access to the other family members via his relationship with Sophia. That said Sophia herself is a most unsympathetic and unlikeable character and I guess I won't be the first reader to suspect her of the crimes herself.


a fine mystery, though too easy to solve to be her greatest   November 7, 2004
flipper (NYC)
6 out of 8 found this review helpful

I would recommend this book for fellow Agatha Christie fans, if for no other reason then because Dame Agatha herself liked it. I must say, though, that after reading all those enthusiastic reviews, I expected a more complicated puzzle. Instead, the solution turned out a bit too obvious for an experienced mystery buff: All the clues are easy to spot and connect, and not only did I suspect who the murderer was long before I finished the book, but also there were a couple of clues that Lady Agatha dropped closer to the end of the novel that really drove the point home.

My personal favorites include (but are not limitied to) the ABC Murders, and Murder is Easy - but this may be solely due to the fact that they were among the first Christie books I've read. Perhaps I got too skilled for my own good in solving her puzzles after I read more of them.

Nonetheless, it's a fine book for classic mystery lovers.