Crooked House

Crooked House
Crooked House by Agatha Christie is a mystery novel that contains suspense, suspicion, and a shocking twist at the end. The story is narrated by Charles Hayward, who hopes to marry Sophia Leonides, the granddaughter of a rich businessman, Aristide Leonides. However, his plans are put on hold when Aristide is murdered, almost certainly by someone in his wealthy household. The Leonides family all hope that the killer is Aristide’s much younger wife, Brenda, but it is unclear whether this really is the case. Charles, the son of an Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, is left to find out the truth, ideally to prove that Brenda is the killer, and therefore clear his way to marry Sophia. The narrator, Charles Hayward, is connected

He is confused as to why Brenda wouldn’t get rid of the incriminating evidence. He talks to her and she tells him her story of how she met Aristide and how his kindness made her truly fall in love with him, no matter what the rest of the family says. When Charles tells Sophia of his discovery that Brenda doesn’t seem like the killer she responds by saying that Brenda put Charles “under her spell” and that she’s just trying to fool him into believing that she’s innocent. Throughout the interviews Charles couldn’t tell if any one was innocent or guilty. It’s not until he talks to Josephine that he begins to find answers. Josephine Leonides is the youngest member of the family and Sophia’s sister. Just twelve years old, she is described as a strange-looking child with a moon-shaped face and a rather unfortunate personality. Whereas her brother and sister, Eustace and Sophia, are good-looking, Josephine has inherited her grandfather’s ugliness. She is described as not being ‘right in her head’, although everyone seems to attribute this to being hereditary and the direct result of her ugliness: “She had had an authoritarian ruthlessness of her grandmother’s

First she put the blame on Brenda, but without any proof so it looked pretty unlikely that she was the killer. Brenda especially made it seem unlikely based on her story of how she met Aristide. She told Charles that she had met Aristide while she was the waitress for his table. Aristide began talking to her and made her feel as though someone truly believed that she could do whatever she wanted to or had ever dreamed of doing. This is what caused her to get married to him, even though she didn’t really love him in that way. She loved him because he was the first person to believe in her in a very long time. Based on this I believed that she was innocent but when her and Laurence’s love letters were discovered I began to have doubts about Brenda. Of course once the nanny was poisoned and Josephine was hurt I knew it wasn’t Brenda or Laurence because they were both in jail when these incidents