Every Version of Crooked House

The house that Christie built for herself

Agatha Christie spent years planning Crooked House before she wrote a word of it. In the foreword to the 1949 first edition she was unusually candid: "This book is one of my own special favorites. I saved it up for years, thinking about it, working it out, saying to myself: one day, when I've plenty of time, and want to really enjoy myself, I'll begin it." She wrote elsewhere that of five books written, only one was real pleasure. This was the one.

The novel is a standalone, with no Poirot and no Miss Marple. Charles Hayward, a former intelligence officer, is in love with Sophia Leonides and wants to marry her. Sophia will not say yes until the murder of her grandfather Aristide, poisoned in his own wing of Three Gables, is solved. The Leonides family is enormous, eccentric, and entirely contained within one irregular house built by joining several older structures together: a house that is, architecturally and morally, crooked. Christie used that claustrophobic single setting to do something she rarely attempted: a portrait of a family as a closed ecosystem, every member plausible as the killer, the solution withheld until the final pages and then delivered as a genuine blow.

The story traveled slowly across media. Television passed on it for decades (perhaps understandably: the twist requires a child, and the ending is genuinely bleak). A BBC Radio 4 dramatization came in 2008. The first film adaptation did not arrive until 2017, nearly 70 years after publication. That gap reflects, more than anything, how seriously uncomfortable this book actually is.