Meanwhile the deceased’s sister-in-law Lady Edith (Glenn Close, pictured above) took on the burden of caring for Josephine (Honor Kneafsey, pictured below), the dangerously neglected and fearfully intelligent young daughter of Philip and Magda who thought of herself as a budding detective.

As he went about his business he even briefly became a suspect himself as a result of his sizzling/fizzling on-off love affair with Olivia. The task of penetrating this cat’s cradle of mutually assured enmities fell to Hayward, working undercover at the bidding of a grizzled inspector from Scotland Yard (Terence Stamp). Then there was a granddaughter, Sophia (Stefanie Martini), who from her time in Cairo during the war happened to be an old flame of the private detective Charles Hayward (Max Irons) summoned to investigate the case on behalf of Scotland Yard. Weak-willed Roger (Christian McKay) had made a hash of the family business and hoped to do good works in a Barbadian orphanage with his childless wife Clemency (Amanda Abbington). Then there were his two sons and their ghastly wives: historian/gambler Philip (Julian Sands) hoped for his father’s patronage to greenlight a film script in which his alcoholic wife Magda (Gillian Anderson) could resurrect her career. They included his latest wife, a pneumatic American dancer Brenda (Christina Hendricks), whom he quietly allowed to canoodle with his grandson’s young tutor (John Heffernan). The titular residence was home to a dysfunctional family of Leonides dependents almost all of whom hoped to be beneficiaries of his elusive will.

In this case the victim was Aristide Leonides, a wealthy patriarch of Greek immigrant stock who had a finger in any number of pies – helping the CIA with their anti-communist work, funding Vegas nightclubs, while creating a vast business empire called Associated Catering – all of them entertaining distractions which turned out to have no bearing on his murder.

See also A Witness for the Prosecution and And Then There Were None (which would have been joined by Ordeal by Innocence on Boxing Day until the BBC pulled it on learning that its star Ed Westwick was accused of rape and sexual assault).Īdapted from the novel published in 1949, the plot of Crooked House adheres to the model of Christie’s two most famous titles, The Mousetrap and Murder on the Orient Express: someone has been done away with, and everyone in situ has a plausible motive. It duly falls in with a recent televisual tradition for serving up the Queen of Crime as a Christmas treat.

Crooked house by agatha christie