We drove up a long, curving drive flanked with rhododendrons and came out on a graveled sweep in front of the house.
It was incredible! I wondered why it had been called Three Gables. Eleven Gables would have been more apposite! The curious thing was that it had a strange air of being distorted – and I thought I knew why. It was the type, really, of a cottage, it was a cottage swollen out of all proportion. It was like looking at a country cottage through a gigantic magnifying glass. The slantwise beams, the half-timbering, the gables – it was a little crooked house that had grown like a mushroom in the night!
The narrator here is a young man named Charles Hayward, and the house he is describing is indeed - as the old nursery rhyme would have it - a little crooked house in a London suburb named Swinly Dean. The house, called Three Gables, is home to the Leonides family, including Sophia Leonides, the young lady whom Charles wishes to marry. Unfortunately, there's a small matter of a murder to be cleared up first. The book is Crooked House, a 1948 "stand-alone" mystery by Agatha Christie, and a book which the author considered to be one of her finest. It's the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the entire review by clicking here.
As I say, this is a "stand-alone," with none of Christie's standard detectives, such as Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, taking part. That role, instead, is filled by Charles Hayward, our narrator. Charles wishes to marry Sophia– but the engagement is delayed when a murder is committed in the Leonides house. Sophia’s grandfather, Aristide Leonides, the head of the family and a very rich man indeed, is poisoned. Charles, whose father is assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, is asked by Sophia (and by his father, for that matter) to help the police discover the murderer.
As Charles senses, this is indeed a crooked house – not in terms of criminality, but rather in the way that some of the personalities of the Leonides family members seem somewhat distorted, somewhat twisted. And certainly that would apply to the unknown murderer who must be living among them…
Crooked House offers the reader some memorable characters, any one of whom might possibly be the villain. The story includes some memorable jolts and surprises, but there are clues for the sharp-eyed reader to find, although most are well-concealed under a barrel of red herrings. It's Christie at her trickiest, which means a lot of entertainment in store for the reader.
There's a movie version now in production in the U.K. It should be interesting to see how the book is adapted. In the meantime, whether you plan to see the movie or not, do yourself a favor and read the book first - it's very very good indeed.
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