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Crooked house novel5/31/2023 His lovely and level-headed granddaughter Sophia Leonides hires PI Charles Hayward, son of a late Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, to investigate Aristides' death. Wealthy 86-year-old Anglo-Greek business magnate Aristide Leonides (inspired by Aristotle Onassis?) dies from an insulin injection fatally laced with eserine (used in eye drops). In marked contrast with recent Phelps-scripted films, Crooked House stays mostly faithful to the book. (Both of these novels have no appearance by Christie's sleuth Hercule Poirot, and this was a time when the author was rather down on Poirot.) It certainly plays to Julian Fellowes' interests, being set at a huge country house among a wealthy family of eccentrics who are partly descended from country gentry. Most people who read this blog probably know the plot of Crooked House, which Christie once named as one of her favorites among her mysteries, along with another non-series novel, Ordeal by Innocence. As Christie fans vigorously debate the merits of Sarah Phelps' scripted 2018 adaptations of the Queen of Crime's novels The ABC Murders (1936) and Ordeal by Innocence (1958), I'd like to remind people who may have missed it that there was another Christie film-one much more calculated, it seems to me, to please traditionalists/textualists-which appeared recently, in 2017: Crooked House, an adaptation of the 1949 novel that was co-scripted by Julian Fellowes of Gosford Park and Downtown Abbey fame.
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