Roger, the eldest son and Aristide’s favourite, is a failure as a businessman. 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. Aside from this, the family members have little in common. The servants do not get bequests but would lose their (increasing) annual wages or bonuses, so are not suspects. According to the will, they all stand to gain a healthy bequest from the old man’s estate.
He becomes a house guest at Three Gables, hoping that someone might reveal a clue at an unguarded moment.Īll the family members had motive and opportunity, none has an alibi and each of them knew that Aristide’s eye medicine was poisonous as he had told all the family after being asked by Josephine. Charles agrees to help his father, an assistant commissioner of Scotland Yard, to investigate the crime.
The family members hope these two prove to be the murderers because they despise Brenda as a gold digger and also hope to escape the scandal that a different outcome would bring. They are rumoured to have been carrying on an illicit love affair under old Leonides’s nose. The obvious suspects are Brenda Leonides, Aristide’s much younger second wife, and Laurence Brown, a conscientious objector who has been living in the house as private tutor to Sophia’s younger brother and sister, Eustace and Josephine. Sophia tells Charles that she can’t marry him until the matter is cleared up. The autopsy reveals that Leonides was poisoned with his own eserine-based eye medicine via an insulin injection. Due to the war, the whole family has been living with him in a sumptuous but ill-proportioned house called “Three Gables”, the crooked house of the title. Hayward returns home and reads a death notice in The Times: Sophia’s grandfather, the wealthy entrepreneur Aristide Leonides, has died, aged 85. They put off getting engaged until the end of the war when they will be reunited in England. 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.
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