Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Ageing, but retains its charms, 4 Mar 2009
Published in 1949 and her 49th book, this is Christie in her natural environment - a mystery set in the claustrophobic confines of a close-knit extended family living, or is that imprisoned together in a large but oppressively incestuous, not entirely stately home. A crooked old man has collected his extended family together in a crooked house where they live in apparent harmony and actual mutual suspicion and animosity. His sudden death plunges the family into a vortex of self-destruction. Finding the killer will not be easy - is anyone really telling the truth? Fortunately, the police have a Trojan Horse - a man with connections to the family and a background in investigation.
This is not a bad little mystery, though its novelty and vision may have paled a little over the decades. The social psychology of this far from happy family is neatly explored and dissected, suspicion being cast broadly, then narrowed down to a couple of suspects, then broadened out again. The use of a boyfriend (potentially fiancé of one of the family) as the police infiltrator is perhaps a little difficult to believe in the 21st century - it's incomprehensible when compared with contemporary police procedurals. And the romance, itself, is so formal and stultifying as to be incomprehensible to modern tastes. But, step outside the anachronistic social structure and gentility of the setting and this remains an excellent mystery, ground-breaking in its day.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Crooked House, 17 Oct 2005
Apparently "Crooked House" was one of the few books that Agatha Christie herself was truly satisfied with upon its completion. Certainly it's an entertaining romp around the totally dysfunctional family of Aristide Leonides and there's many an amusing character to enjoy.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.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent murder mystery, with a very crooked twist., 29 Jan 2001
By A Customer
One of the best and most original murder mysteries that I've read, the family around which the whole plot revolves are all astoundingly different, they add their own tensions to an already confused situation, the murder victim is someone we should never like but do, in fact its even possible to have sympathy with the gold digger wife. The ending took me completely by suprise, altogether one of my most enjoyable reads this year.
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