Crooked House

The term “bad seed” means a genetically evil person, someone who is corrupt by nature. This idea of preexisting morality is one that recurs throughout Christie’s works. When several characters have a motive to kill, the quality that distinguishes Christie’s murderer(s) is a moral compass that was defective from birth. Her writing tends to divide characters firmly into the categories of good and evil, with the evil characters (often murderers) being irredeemably and thoroughly bad.

After learning of her grandfather’s murder, Sophia worries that there is wickedness lurking somewhere in her bloodline. She’s correct; the bad seed of Crooked House’s Leonides family is 12-year-old Josephine, who turns out to be a double murderess. Though Christie portrays her as innately wicked, Josephine is a child who was ostracized by her parents due to her unattractive looks and strange personality. Her upbringing at Three Gables raises questions about whether her crimes are a result of nature, nurture, or a combination of the two.

When asked what makes a murderer, Arthur responds: “the brake that operates within most of us doesn’t operate with them” (95). Charles soon discovers that every person living at Three Gables had a potential motive to murder Aristide. Each family member has their own kind of ruthlessness, and each might have had a bone to pick with their late patriarch. Yet their flaws are balanced by an essential kindness, the moral “brake” that stops them from killing. Regardless of their smaller failings, they can all be counted among Christie’s “good” characters.

In Josephine, the pitfalls of heredity unite violently. Though Charles likes her, recognizing a bright and inquisitive nature, other members of the Leonides family are uneasy about her ugliness and sneaky behavior. Their dislike is validated by the late revelation that she killed Aristide and Janet. She killed them on a whim with the flawed reasoning of a child, murdering Aristide for not allowing her to attend ballet lessons and Janet over verbal slights.

Charles believes that Josephine was “born with a kink” (199), marked by the worst qualities of her forebears: ruthlessness, unscrupulousness, and violent tendencies inherited from her grandfather, who stabbed two men in his own youth. By chance, Josephine lacks the characteristics that redeem the other Leonides descendants. While Charles and Sophia express remorse over her death, the way Christie ends the novel implies that Edith’s decision to kill her in a murder-suicide was the correct one to prevent further harm. Josephine, like Christie’s other murderers, is not meant to be redeemable; she is evil to the core and would have continued her misdeeds unless forcibly stopped.

An internal switch set to “evil” is not the only thing that contributed to Josephine’s crimes. She was singled out by her family long before Aristide’s murder. Magda seems repulsed by the child’s ugliness and often ignores her. Philip is coldly uninvolved. Aristide, apparently recognizing her bent early on, kept her as secluded as possible from the rest of the world. Even her great-aunt Edith, perhaps her closest familial ally, characterizes her as “not quite right” (197). Josephine’s flaws are picked at, while her good qualities, like her intelligence and innate curiosity, are neglected.

The characterization of Josephine as mentally “wrong” is informed by the eyes of her high-society family, for whom adherence to social norms is everything. If given proper support and perhaps treatment for more alarming behaviors, Josephine might have utilized her wit and ambition to great effect. Instead, she receives isolation and judgement. By othering her so severely, her family deprives her of the chance to develop conventional morality through interactions with peers and learning experiences, arguably feeding into the wickedness that ultimately tears them apart.

There is no question of rehabilitating Josephine after her crime is uncovered. Christie’s bad seeds can only grow into bad plants, the choking bindweed in the garden. Edith makes sure that the “crooked little girl from the crooked house” (198) never makes it to crooked adulthood, leaving behind an uneasy question: Was Josephine a remorseless murderess or a victim who was failed by her family and society?