The crooked house
The crooked house (AKA The Crooked House ) is the 39th mystery novel by Agatha Christie . It first appeared in the United States in March 1949 with Dodd, Mead and Company and on May 23 of the same year in the United Kingdom with the Collins Crime Club . The German first edition was published in 1951 by Scherz Verlag (Bern) in a translation by Alexandra Brun. In the 1980s, the new translation by Ursula von Wiese, which was used until 2017, was published by the same publisher.
The novel is set in and around London in the autumn of 1947. In her autobiography, Christie names this novel and Deadly Error as her favorites among her own works.
Explanation of the title of the novel
Like other titles by the author, this novel uses a motif from a nursery rhyme :
- There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile.
- He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile.
- He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse,
- And they all lived together in a little crooked house.
The first evidence of this rhyme comes from James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps from the 1840s. In the early 20th century - the time of Christie's childhood - the rhyme was very popular.
introduction
Three generations of the Leonides family, who come from Greece, live under the patriarchy of their grandfather Aristide in a large, but a little crooked house. He is an old man from Smyrna, now Izmir , who made a fortune in England. He lives with his second wife, Brenda, who is fifty years younger than him.
After the old man has been poisoned with his own medicine, his granddaughter Sophia tells the story to her fiancé Charles Hayward and asks him to postpone the marriage until the killer is found. Hayward, the first-person narrator of the novel, then begins his own investigation.
action
Charles Hayward, who worked in Cairo at the end of World War II, met Sophia Leonides there, a young woman in her early twenties who worked for the State Department. They both fall in love, but decide not to get engaged until the end of the war. The engagement is now due to take place after his return to London.
When Hayward comes home, he finds an obituary in the Times: Sophia's grandfather, the wealthy entrepreneur, died at the age of 87.
During the war, the whole family lived together in one large house - three gables - the crooked house from which it was named.
During the autopsy it is found that Aristide Leonides had been poisoned by injecting him with eye drops, which are very toxic, disguised as an insulin administration. Sophia then tells Charles that she cannot marry him until the murder is solved.
The obvious suspects are Brenda Leonides, the much younger second wife of Aristide and Laurence Brown, a young man who was not at war and lives in the home as the tutor of Eustace and Josephine, Sophia's younger siblings. It is rumored that the two had a relationship right under the eyes of old Aristides. All family members hope that the two of them can be proven to have committed murder. However, the first investigations did not reveal any concrete suspicions. So Charles, whose father works at Scotland Yard, moves into the house in the hope that someone will still be naked.
All members of the family have a motive and opportunity for the crime, no one has an alibi, and everyone knows that the eye drops are very toxic. Besides, each would receive a not inconsiderable share of the old man's legacy.
Apart from that, the family members have little in common. Edith de Haviland, Aristides' unmarried sister-in-law, the sister of his first wife, is an oppressed and embittered woman who only moved into the house to supervise the upbringing of the children after the death of her first wife. Roger, Aristide's eldest son and darling, is ultimately a failed entrepreneur who almost bankrupted his father's business. He longs for a simple life, somewhere, just far away. His wife, Clemency, is a bitter-tasting scientist who has never enjoyed the benefits of family wealth. Philip, Roger's younger brother, suffered all his life from his father's favor with Rogers. Retired to the world of books and bygone eras, he spends all the time he is awake in the house library. Philip's wife Magda is a modestly successful actress who sees everything, including the murder in the family, as a stage show in which she must play a leading role. Sixteen-year-old Eustace still suffers a little from the effects of minor polio, but is otherwise a normal boy. His twelve-year-old sister Josephine is not a pretty girl, but she is intelligent and funny and a little precocious. She is obsessed with detective stories and is constantly spying on everyone in the household. She writes her observations in a secret notebook.
Things get more complicated when it comes out that Aristide has changed his will. He left everything to Sophia because he believed that only she would be able to lead the company properly into the future and take the place as head of the family. Next, Josephine is found unconscious in the garden, knocked down by a marble doorstop after declaring that she knows the killer's identity. Charles then discovers love letters from Brenda to Lawrence, whereupon they are both arrested. And although both are now in custody, the nanny dies after drinking a cocoa that was actually intended for Josephine. The family realizes that the killer is still among them.
Charles, who fears for the life of Josephine, tries to get the name of the murderer out of her, but it is in vain. Shortly afterwards, Edith de Haviland invites the girl to an ice cream. Both drive off in the car, Edith drives the car over a cliff, both are instantly dead.
In the house, Charles finds two letters, a farewell letter from Edith for the police and one to Charles. In the letter to the police, she confesses to the murders of Aristide, the nanny, and Josephine. In the other, intended only for Charles, she writes the whole truth: Josephine is the murderer. As proof, she adds the secret notebooks that begin with the sentence: Today I killed grandfather.
The motive is that the grandfather did not want to pay for the ballet lessons. Later she got all the attention and also staged the attack with the doorstop herself. The nanny poisoned her for suggesting that she be sent to Switzerland and calling her "a little stupid girl". Edith had discovered the notebooks in the doghouse and had chosen her way to prevent the police from finding out the truth.
people
- Charles Hayward, fiance of Sophia Leonides
- Sophia Leonides, daughter of Magda and Philip Leonides, granddaughter of Aristide
- Brenda Leonides, the young widow of Aristide Leonides
- Edith de Haviland, Sophia's great-aunt
- Roger Leonides, son of Aristide
- Clemency Leonides, his wife, a scientist
- Philip Leonides, Roger's brother
- Magda Leonides, his wife
- Josephine Leonides, Magda's 12 year old daughter
- Eustace Leonides, her brother
- Laurence Brown, teacher of Josephine and Eustace
Film adaptations
A movie adaptation, Das krumme Haus , was released in 2017. Directed by Gille Paquet-Brenner , the role of Charles Hayward was played by Max Irons .
Major expenses
- 1949, Dodd Mead and Company (New York), March 1949
- 1949, Collins Crime Club (London), 23 May 1949
- 1951 German first edition
- 1983 (?) New translation by Ursula von Wiese
- 2017 New translation by Giovanni and Ditte Bandini, Atlantik Verlag, Hamburg
An abridged version of the novel first appeared in the US in Cosmopolitan in the October 1948 edition.
Audio books
- 2008 Das krumme Haus (5 CDs): only unabridged reading. Speaker: Hans Eckardt. Director: Markus Langer: Publishing house and studio for audio book productions, Marburg
Web links
- Crooked House on the official Agatha Christie website
Individual evidence
- ↑ American Tribute to Agatha Christie
- ^ The Scotsman May 19, 1949 (Page 9)
- ↑ a b German first edition in the catalog of the Swiss National Library
- ↑ a b New translation in the catalog of the German National Library
- ^ A b I. Opie and P. Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edn., 1997), p. 289
- ↑ Crooked House (2017). Retrieved February 4, 2017 .
- ↑ Audiobook (complete) in the catalog of the German National Library