Crooked House: If you like mysteries, this one's for you!

Crooked House

The granddaughter of late business magnate Aristide Leonides, Sophia Leonides, visits confidential investigator Charles Hayward in his office. Sophia hires Charles to investigate Aristide's death, for she believes he was murdered by a member of his rambling and peculiar family. Sophia notes that Leonides' regular insulin injection had been tie up with serine from his eye drops, the resulting chemicals in them causing him to die. Sophia believes this to have been a purposeful switch rather than unintentional. Charles begrudgingly concurs to take on the case as a result of his feelings for Sophia as the two had enjoyed a brief love affair when they had met sometime former in Cairo. Charles seeks the consent of Chief Inspector Taverner of Scotland Yard to look into the case, utilizing his personal connection with Taverner, who had served with Charles's father, a decorated former Assistant Commissioner who was assassinated.

Charles visits the Leonides domain and proceeds to interview the various members of the family, finding various aims of each. Charles begins with Lady Edith De Haviland, the sister of Leonides's first wife, who abhorrent her brother-in-law and his insensitive attitude towards her grandchildren. Leonides's eldest son, Philip, despised his father for passing him over to run the family business and for declining to take interest in a new play he'd written for his wife, Magda, a departured theater actress. Philip and Magda provided Leonides with three grandchildren, namely Sophia and the talented younger children Eustace and Josephine. Eustace takes a dislike to Charles and seeks to obstruct him wherever possible whilst Josephine makes clear to Charles that she snoops on everyone around the house, makes annotations about their private lives and dislikes most of her family except for Edith and Sophia.

Charles subsequently finds that Leonides' younger son, Roger, the emotionally immature managing director of the family's flagship business, was reliant upon his father bailing out the business numerous times due to his poor management. The fact that Leonides was so willing to bail Roger out did not sit well with either Roger, due to his pride, or his domineering wife Clemency. Charles further finds that Leonides' second wife, Brenda, a much younger former Las Vegas casino dancer, is suspected by the rest of the family as having committed the murder. Evidence seems to back this up due to the facts that Brenda had been having an affair with Laurence Brown, the private tutor for the Leonides children, as well as that she administered the fatal dose of drugs to Leonides and that she stood to inherit the entirety of the Leonides estate due to him not having signed a will, meaning he died intestate and thus his estate passed to her.
Charles's investigations and questions are met with unfriendliness by most of the family whilst Josephine cryptically mentions at clues along the way, to Charles's irritation, as he finds her treating the investigation as a game to be dull. Events take a new, horrific turn when the ladder to Josephine's tree-house is sabotaged and she falls from the tree, being hospitalized. Charles suspects that this was due to Josephine's tendency of spying on the other family members and the killer thus wanting to silence her. In the aftermath, Charles's doubts are heightened and even extend to Sophia after a new will is discovered in which Leonides had left his estate to her, with some quarrelling that Sophia hired Charles to investigate the murder due to their personal history, knowing he would never blame her due to their romantic past.

After those developments, Taverner arrives to take charge of the case as he feels Charles' romantic history with Sophia hindrances him to solve it. The discovery of love letters between Brenda and Laurence gives Taverner enough facts to capture them for Leonides' murder and the attempt on Josephine, to the gladness of most of his family members who had always loathed both. Charles, however, remains unconvinced that Brenda and Laurence are blameworthy, noting Brenda's childlike cleverness and Laurence's antiwar, left-wing views as making them unlikely candidates for being a murderer. Sophia and Edith seem to agree, with Sophia noting how the letters could have been faked and Edith paying for a lawyer to represent Brenda and Laurence in court. In the meantime, Charles returns to London and only returns to the estate when Josephine's nanny dies after being poisoned by drinking a mug of hot chocolate that she had made for Josephine.

Charles beseeches Josephine to tell her who the killer is as he has worked out she knows their identity. Again, Josephine declines to tell. After it is figured out that the nanny died of cyanide poisoning, Charles begins to suspect Edith as he knew she had been using cyanide to remove moles in the garden. His search of Edith's garden shack finds a bottle of cyanide as well as Josephine's missing notebook, complete with her observations on each member of the family. Edith drives out of the family estate with Josephine, having also left a letter for Charles to find. Charles and Sophia take off in search of Edith in a car chase to try and stop them. In the car, Sophia reads the note that Edith had left in which she admits to the murder but Charles disagrees that he believes Edith is not the killer.

Sophia reads extracts from Josephine's notebook in which the child admits to murdering Leonides simply because he had denies to pay for her ballet lessons. The notebook further discloses that Josephine had also faked the attack on herself and had poisoned her nanny when the latter began to suspect Josephine. Lady Edith had figured out that Josephine was the killer and planted proofs and wrote the confession letter to spare Josephine a life in psychiatric association and absolve Brenda and Laurence. Edith had earlier been informed by her doctor that she was dying of cancer and so decided to forfeit herself to protect Josephine and the rest of the family. Edith realizes that Charles and Sophia are chasing her and so she drives her car over the cliff top of a quarry, killing herself and Josephine. The film ends as Charles soothes a traumatized Sophia at the edge of the cliff.

Reviews: Imbd~ 6.3/10 stars
                Rotten Tomatoes~ 3.5/5 stars

 Cosmic Info: 5.5/7 Bands
" A fine and suspicious story by Agatha Christie. The one where you can't predict the killer. Quite a dramatic turn in the end"