Known as Three Gables - the ‘crooked house’ of the title - it’s located in the posh suburb of Swinly Dean outside London: ‘We drove up a long curving drive, flanked with rhododendrons, and came out on a graveled sweep in front of the house… It was a cottage swollen out of all proportion.
The manor house, too, plays a vital role in the story. That’s a neat trick that underscores why Christie is still one of the world’s most-read authors. They’re all mildly untrustworthy while also generating our sympathy. Everyone in this family could benefit from regular therapy sessions. As Charles slowly becomes acquainted with his future in-laws, he drags their dark secrets and personal failings into the light.Ĭhristie is the ruling mistress of mysteries featuring a closed circle of suspects she delivers plenty of plausible culprits and delectable red herrings. The suspects are archetypes that have been fleshed out in all their messy human glory: the tutor with ambitions, the misunderstood younger wife, the competitive sons, the spinster aunt, the precocious little girl, and Charles’ fiance, the alluring Sophia. He pokes around the family, asking painfully inappropriate and impolite questions. The ostensible hero of the story is Charles Hayward, the fiancé of one of the suspects and the son of a Scotland Yard commissioner. When that end comes, it packs a truly disturbing punch.įirst published in 1949, the story is set just after World War II when the former gentry was grappling with the fact that their old money didn’t go quite as far as it used to.
This stand-alone has perfect pacing and a wickedly winding plot that keeps you guessing until the end. The cases solved by Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple can be chilly and intellectual, but this novel is fraught with passions barely held in check and resentments honed like fine crystal.
But everyone at Three Gables has a motive for murder. When millionaire Aristide Leonides is poisoned, the victim’s sensuous, much younger wife is the prime suspect.
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