There is also Miss Edith de Haviland, the sister of Aristide’s first wife who pretty much brought up the children, the children’s old nanny, and the mousy conscientious objector Laurence Brown, tutor to Eustace and Josephine. These living arrangements are a consequence of the war. Philip’s older brother Roger, who is good natured but has a poor business sense, and his wife, a scientist, Clemency also live in the house. There is also her younger sister Josephine, a twelve-year-old who makes rather macabre observations and has a great interest in playing detective (and is something of a snoop). Sophia’s younger brother, the good-looking but irritable Eustace is being educated at home having suffered paralysis. Also living in the house are Sophia’s parents, Philip who writes obscure history books and Magda, an actress given to treating even real life as a performance (and dramatizing it whenever she can).
Aristide has only recently remarried a much younger woman, Brenda, an obvious gold digger, who seems fairly happy spending his money. As a person who is an outsider (who doesn’t know the family), and yet an insider (as Sophia’s fiancé), Charles is asked by both his father and Sophia to be involved in the matter.Īt the Leonides home, Three Gables (the ‘Crooked House’ of the title), Charles finds a set of curious residents. Charles’ father is the Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard while Chief Inspector Taverner is investigating the case. But when he meets Sophia, he finds that Aristide has not died a natural death but was poisoned.
When he arrives in England some two years later, he finds a newspaper announcement to the effect that Sophia’s eighty-five-year-old grandfather, the self-made tycoon, Aristide Leonides has died. He plans to marry her when he returns to England from his next posting.
In Crooked House, our narrator, Charles Hayward (wrongly described in the blurb of my 2002 St Martin’s Press edition as a criminologist) meets and falls in love with the attractive and intelligent Sophia Leonides when the two are posted in Egypt during the war.
0 kommentar(er)
