Crooked House

“‘It may be alright if—’

‘If what?’

‘If the right person did it.’”

The “right person” is Brenda. The rest of the Leonides family thinks she is a gold-digger, and if she is found guilty, they will be happy to cast her out and avoid a familial scandal. Arthur is speaking to Charles here, showing that a bias toward Brenda’s guilt affects even the investigating officers, who are supposed to be neutral.

“She’s what I call the harem type. Likes sitting about and eating sweets and having nice clothes and jewelry and reading cheap novels and going to the cinema.”

The Leonides family’s hatred of Brenda is based on her lower-class origins. All the actions that Sophia describes here are harmless; however, the Leonideses view these actions as damning evidence of a fundamental class difference, one that they believe makes Brenda less worthy of respect.

“You see, we’re a very queer family […] There’s a lot of ruthlessness in us—and—different kinds of ruthlessness. That’s what’s so disturbing. The different kinds.”

The preexistence of good or evil within an individual is a major theme of the novel. Here, Sophia muses that ruthlessness is an innate Leonides family trait, though the different types of ruthlessness vary from person to person. She is alarmed that she and her family members all share a capacity for cruelty.

“Once when he was telling us about his boyhood in Smyrna, he mentioned, quite casually, that he had stabbed two men. It was some kind of unforgivable insult—I don’t know—but it was just a thing that had happened quite naturally.”

Despite being well-loved and charming, Aristide also harbored a congenital crookedness within him—Sophia dismissively states that it was “quite natural” for her grandfather to have stabbed and possibly killed two men. She can brush off the deceased man’s twisted streak but worries that he has passed it down to the rest of the family.

“Hateful stuff—bindweed! Worst weed there is! Choking, entangling—and you can’t get at it properly, runs along underground.”

Bindweed symbolizes evil and wrongdoing, as shown by the biting adjectives Edith uses to describe it. Her lament that it’s impossible to get rid of bindweed speaks to Christie’s view that evil is a deep-rooted and inborn quality that will always manifest in some unlucky humans.

“‘Oh, grandfather wasn’t taken in.’ Sophia laughed. ‘Grandfather was never taken in by anybody. He wanted Brenda. He wanted to play Cophetua to her beggar maid. He knew just what he was doing and it worked out beautifully according to plan.’”

Sophia references the story of “The King and the Beggar-maid,” a folktale about a king named Cophetua who falls in love at first sight with the beggar Penelophon. The moment he lays eyes on her, Cophetua decides he must have her and proposes marriage on the spot. By saying that Aristide wanted to play Cophetua, Sophia implies that he was aware of his role in his unconventional romance and even played into the dynamic willingly, enjoying the theatrics.

“Sometimes I think that child isn’t right in her head. She has horrible sneaky ways, and she looks queer…She gives me the shivers sometimes.”

The sentiment that there is something off about Josephine is echoed by several of her relatives. Their suspicions foreshadow the revelation that she is the killer and show how she is othered and neglected in a way that feeds into her moral failings.

“Sophia’s sister, Josephine, was, I judged, about eleven or twelve years of age. She was a fantastically ugly child with a very distinct likeness to her grandfather. It seemed to me possible that she also had his brains.”

Charles’s musing that Josephine and Aristide are alike is more correct than he knows. Though Aristide identifies Sophia as the grandchild who is most like him, he ostensibly passed down many qualities to the less-loved Josephine, including the violent streak that made her capable of murder.

“‘A man like that oughtn’t to be in business at all,’ said Taverner.

‘He probably wouldn’t be,’ said my father, ‘except for the accident of being Aristide Leonides’s son.’”

Roger has no business sense, but he continues to struggle in the role of CEO because he doesn’t want to let his father down. His miserable situation is an example of how Aristide’s way of loving and supporting his family was misguided.

“One feels, very often, as though these nice ordinary chaps had been overtaken, as it were, by murder, almost accidentally […] The brake that operates with most of us doesn’t operate with them.”

This quote from Arthur outlines Christie’s philosophy on evil. People are either good or bad, and the line separating them is simple genetic chance, a switch that is flipped before birth. Following this logic, anyone in the Leonides family could be the murderer.

“Take the de Haviland ruthlessness, and what we might call the Leonides’s unscrupulousness—the de Havilands are all right because they’re not unscrupulous, and the Leonides are alright because, though unscrupulous, they are kindly—but get a descendant who inherited both of those traits—see what I mean?”

Here Christie elaborates on the theme of inherent evil, presenting it as the result of a combination of negative traits that alone can be redeemed but together make a person dangerous and violent.

“‘Oh, don’t you understand?’ she said impatiently. ‘We’re free—at last!’”

Clemency’s reaction might seem callous, but it shows that Aristide’s influence on the family, though well-intentioned, was not always positive. Loyalty to his beloved father was like a prison for Roger, who felt like he couldn’t leave the failing family business while the old man was alive.

“I think what I meant was that we hadn’t been able to grow up independent, standing by ourselves, upright. We’re all a bit twisted and twining.”

This quote by Sophia gets at the heart of the Leonides family’s problem. They have suffered from an excess of misguided love and support by Aristide, in addition to their unnaturally close quarters. Apart from Sophia, none of them have developed strong personalities, so they all must lean on their dysfunctional relationships with one another.

“‘I think children of her own age would be a good thing for Josephine.’

‘Grandfather didn’t think so,’ said Sophia obstinately.”

This quote hints that Aristide deliberately kept Josephine isolated in her childhood, a factor that might have contributed to her lacking a sense of morality. As an outsider, Charles sees past the Leonides family’s anti-Josephine biases and concludes that every child needs and deserves to be around people their own age.

“The whole family wanted it to be Brenda and Laurence, hoped it might be Brenda and Laurence, but didn’t really believe it was Brenda and Laurence…”

Throughout the narrative, Christie drops in clues that Brenda and Laurence are being falsely accused. Here, Charles essentially warns the reader that they are red herrings long before their innocence is confirmed.

“He’s prejudiced, I said, by the number of cases on his files where elderly husbands have been poisoned by sweet young wives.”

Suspicions around Brenda are partially based on the frequency of poisoning murders committed by young and attractive women. Christie primes readers to suspect that Brenda will fulfill this trope before subverting it in the final chapters.

“In a family (this I have observed in my boyhood and never forgotten) there is always one strong character, and it usually falls to this one person to care for, and bear the burden, of the rest of the family.”

In Christie’s world, good is as innate and unpredictable as evil. Some people are born exceptional in a good way, like Sophia, whose radiant personality is just as much a result of chance as Josephine’s corrupted one.

“Men are not born equal—to offset the natural inequality of Nature one must redress the balance.”

Aristide’s justification for leaving his entire fortune to Sophia is his conviction that some people are just better than others, a belief that’s in line with the novel’s prevailing philosophy of innate good and evil. As there is nothing to be done about the random nature of heredity, Aristide’s solution is not leveling the playing field but giving more responsibility to those who have the most positive characteristics.

“A changeling, the mistress used to call her. I blame the mistress for that, for it’s my belief it turned the child sour.”

Josephine’s nanny Janet acknowledges that her off-putting conduct might not be entirely due to genetics. Josephine is also treated badly by her family members, an experience that might have left her with trauma expressed through antisocial and violent tendencies.

“She had said that she supposed she could murder someone, but if so, she had added, it must be for something really worthwhile.”

This is the only point in the novel where Charles seriously considers Sophia as a suspect, and even then, it is only for a moment. His reluctance to suspect his fiancé indicates that he is an unreliable narrator. His biases affect his view of the investigation and his recounting of the events.

“She had had the authoritarian ruthlessness of her grandmother’s family, and the ruthless egoism of Magda, seeing only her own point of view. She had also presumably suffered, sensitive like Philip, from the stigma of being the unattractive—the changeling—child of the family.”

Charles summarizes the causes of Josephine’s precocious crimes as a combination of nature and nurture. This quote lends greater subtlety to Christie’s black-and-white depiction of morality.

“Josephine was, as Sophia had said, a little monster, but she was a pathetic little monster. She had been born with a kink—the crooked child of the little crooked house.”

Christie chooses to portray Josephine as both a victimizer and a victim. Her evil acts were the combined result of parentage and a neglectful upbringing, neither of which are her fault. Though ultimately judged irredeemable, Josephine still invites sympathy.

“In poor little Josephine all the worst of the family came together. In you, Sophia, I fully believe that all that is bravest and best in the Leonides family has been handed down to you.”

Heredity is a double-edged sword in Crooked House. Good and evil traits are dealt out unequally, so that Josephine’s misfortune is balanced by Sophia’s luck. By sheer chance, both inherit the extremes of their familial characteristics on opposite ends of the spectrum. It’s an unfair situation that has no remedy in Christie’s world.