Crooked House

Crooked House is a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, first published in the United States by Dodd, Mead and Company in March 1949 and in the United Kingdom by the Collins Crime Club on 23 May of the same year. The action takes place in and near London in the autumn of 1947.

Christie said that the titles of this novel and Ordeal by Innocence were her favourites among her own works, and she told The Sunday Times that she most enjoyed writing the Crooked House kind of novel, which depends on a family and the interplay of their lives. The title comes from a nursery rhyme, and the narrator's fiancee Sophia explains that it refers not to dishonesty but to the family's inability to grow up independently, tangled rather than crooked.

The plot is closed and domestic. An entire household is under suspicion, the suspect list is the dinner table, and the investigation has to work through the relationships rather than through physical evidence. That concentration on a family is why the book is often named as one of Christie's strongest, and why it is not one of the Poirot or Marple titles.