Crooked House is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in March 1949[1] and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on 23 May of the same year.

Narrator Charles's fiancée Sophia says it refers not to dishonesty, but rather "we hadn't been able to grow up independent... twisted and twining", meaning unhealthily interdependent on the intensely strong personality of the family patriarch, Aristide Leonides.

After Aristide is poisoned by his own eye medicine (eserine), his granddaughter Sophia tells narrator and fiancé Charles Hayward that they cannot marry until the killer is apprehended.

Towards the end of the Second World War, Charles Hayward is in Cairo and falls in love with Sophia Leonides, a smart, successful Englishwoman who works for the Foreign Office.

Hayward returns home and reads a death notice in The Times: Sophia's grandfather, the wealthy entrepreneur Aristide Leonides, has died, aged 87.

Edith de Haviland, Aristide's unmarried sister-in-law, is a brusque woman in her 70s who came to stay with him after his first wife's death to supervise his children's upbringing.

Roger's wife Clemency, a scientist with austere and unsentimental tastes, has never been able to enjoy the wealth offered by her husband's family.

Philip's wife Magda is an only moderately successful actress to whom everything, even a family murder, is a stage show in which she wants to play a leading part.

Maurice Richardson, in the 29 May 1949 issue of The Observer, gave a positive review in comparison to his opinion of Taken at the Flood the previous year: "Her forty-ninth book and one of her best seven.

"[3] An unnamed reviewer in the Toronto Daily Star of 12 March 1949 wrote: "Chief Inspector Taverner of Scotland Yard was as brilliant as usual but barking up the wrong tree – as Agatha Christie demonstrates in a surprise ending which introduces a novel idea in murder mystery.

article of Entertainment Weekly Issue #1343-44 (26 December 2014–3 January 2015), the writers picked Crooked House as an "EW favorite" on the list of the "Nine Great Christie Novels".

It starred Rory Kinnear (Charles Hayward), Anna Maxwell Martin (Sophia Leonides), and Phil Davis (Chief Insp.

In 2011, US filmmaker Neil La Bute announced that he would be directing a feature film version, for 2012, of the novel with a script by Julian Fellowes.

[8] In a report issued on 10 June 2012, Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions acquired all rights in the US, Canada and internationally for the film, which could help secure it a lucrative release, though the cast and creative team had changed.

The film, directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner and starring Christina Hendricks, Gillian Anderson, Max Irons, Glenn Close, Julian Sands, Terence Stamp, Stefanie Martini and Christian McKay, was released digitally on 21 November 2017 and first broadcast on Channel 5 on 17 December 2017.