Crooked House
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- There is also a short story by science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein entitled “—And He Built a Crooked House—”.
Crooked House (published in 1949) is a whodunnit novel by Agatha Christie. The action takes place in and near London in the autumn of 1947. Christie has said that this was one of her two favorites of her own works, the other being Ordeal by Innocence.
Plot
The first person narrator is Charles Hayward who, towards the end of the Second World War, occupies some post in Cairo. There he meets Sophia Leonides, who works for the Foreign Office there. They fall in love with each other but put off getting engaged until after the end of the war when they will be reunited back home in England.
When Hayward arrives back home it is only to find an obituary in The Times: Sophia's grandfather, Aristide Leonides, has died, aged 87. Due to the war, the whole family has been living together under one roof, in a large house near London, among them Leonides' second wife, whom many in the family dislike and see as nothing more than a gold digger.
When the news is broken that Aristide Leonides has been poisoned, via a diabetic injection, Charles is unwittingly drawn into the case.
The obvious suspects are Brenda Leonides herself, no longer willing to wait for her inheritance, and Laurence Brown, a conscientious objector who also lives in the house as private tutor to Eustace and Josephine, Sophia's younger brother and sister. Rumour has it that Brenda Leonides and Brown have been carrying on an illicit love affair right under old Leonides's nose. In fact all family members want them to be the murderers because it would be the easiest way out for them and the family's good name would not suffer. Charles agrees to help his father, Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, investigate the crime, when no interviews can lead conclusively to any one suspect.
The Leonides family are a strange lot: Edith de Haviland, Aristide's unmarried sister-in-law, 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; his wife Clemency, an austere-looking scientist, 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. 16 year-old Eustace still suffers from the aftereffects of some childhood disease, but otherwise is just an ordinary boy. His sister Josephine, aged 12, on the other hand, is exceptionally ugly to look at and preoccupied with detective stories, which she has been devouring for some time.
Things get complicated when Charles learns that Leonides redrafted his will to leave everything to Sophia, and when someone attempts to kill Josephine, who has been bragging that she knows the identity of the killer. But, even after hidden love letters are discovered and Brenda and Laurence are arrested, worse things begin to happen as Josephine's nanny dies after drinking a poisoned cup of cocoa originally intended for Josephine, and the family realize that the killer is still among them.
Nursery rhyme
The title is a reference to a nursery rhyme, a common theme of Christie's.
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