Second paragraph of third chapter:
I had not yet seen the Old Man. He had been out when I arrived, and after a bath, a shave and a change I had gone out to meet Sophia. When I returned to the house, however, Glover told me that he was in his study.
Since I am trawling through the less popular Agatha Christies at present, I am at the point where most of them are not up to her usual standards (the last one I wrote up here was described by the author herself as “rotten”. But sometimes you get a gem that has escaped the acclaim given to her best known work, and Crooked House is one of those. No Poirot, no Marple; the narrator is a junior diplomat whose father is a senior police detective, and whose girlfriend’s grandfather has just been gruesomely murdered. The entire family (apart from the lovely girlfriend) are a horror show of emotional abuse, all of whom had means and motive, and working out which of them did it takes up a very entertaining 200+ pages.
I had read it years back, but could only remember who was responsible for the second murder attempt, so it was good and fresh for me. There is the usual cop-out of not facing human justice at the end, which perhaps requires a bit more ethical examination than Christie usually gives, but otherwise I felt this was a story where Christie plays the game fairly, and the clues are there if you look past the narrator’s biases. You can get Crooked House here.
Agatha Christie:
The Mysterious Affair at Styles | The Secret Adversary | The Murder on the Links | The Man in the Brown Suit | The Murder of Roger Ackroyd | The Big Four | The Mystery of the Blue Train | The Murder at the Vicarage | Murder on the Orient Express | The A.B.C. Murders | Murder in Mesopotamia | Cards on the Table | Death on the Nile | Appointment With Death | Hercule Poirot’s Christmas | And Then There Were None | Evil Under the Sun | The Body in the Library | Five Little Pigs | Crooked House | A Murder Is Announced | 4.50 from Paddington | Hallowe’en Party
