84 pages • 2 hours read
Agatha ChristieCrooked House
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1949A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Bindweed
Also known as wild morning glory, bindweed is a climbing vine plant with an extensive root network. It is extremely difficult to get rid of and, if left unchecked, it will overrun other plants in its path, crowding and starving them to death. In Christie’s canon, this plant symbolizes corrupt morality—it’s a symbol that occurs not just in Crooked House but in Christie’s other works, including Sleeping Murder.
In an early scene, Edith points out bindweed growing in the Three Gables garden. She explains that it is a “choking, entangling” plant that kills other plants in its path. It grows mostly underground and is impossible to fully to get rid of. Like the crooked gene in the Leonides family, the plant is deep-rooted and fast-growing, causing harm to everything in its path.
As Charles watches, Edith rips up a piece of bindweed and grinds it under her heel. This foreshadows her decision to kill Josephine at the end of the novel, destroying the bad seed of the Leonides family to protect the survivors.
Edith succeeds in ridding the world of one murderer, but like bindweed, human evil is deep-rooted and insidious. The greater forces that drive murderous acts—vanity, jealousy, moral corruption, and countless others—will remain in the world, lurking below the surface.
The Crooked House
The leaning, overgrown cottage at Three Gables houses three generations of the Leonides family. Sophia dubs the cottage a “crooked house,” an image pulled from a popular English nursery rhyme. She uses this symbol to explain the twisted nature of her family. Their crookedness originates from the crooked man himself, Aristide, whose misguided love for his descendants fosters unhealthy codependence.
After bringing the Leonides relatives together under one roof, Aristide plays them off one another, leading them to grow “twisted and twined” in a mixture of love and hatred. Their relationships simmer with resentment, jealousy, and frustration, yet they also care for one another intensely—perhaps too much, as Sophia observes in Chapter 15. Under Aristide’s benevolent but controlling hand, they feel trapped in roles that don’t serve them. Living at Three Gables brings out the worst in them and makes them all into bent versions of themselves.
Josephine’s Notebook
Josephine’s little black notebook, where she writes down all her observations throughout the investigation, represents the elusive truth behind Crooked House’s two murders. When he first meets Josephine, Charles is charmed by her desire to play detective. She listens at doors, roots through the attic, and hints that she knows exactly who the killer is. She is cagey about revealing the killer’s identity, however—because, as it’s later revealed, she is the one who murdered Aristide and Janet.
As the investigation proceeds, no one looks twice at Josephine due to her age. As such, no particular care is taken to find her secret notebook. The truth hides in plain sight under the Three Gables roof until the novel’s explosive final chapters. After Edith kills herself and Josephine, she leaves behind two letters and an envelope containing the notebook. The notebook contains Josephine’s confession in her own words: “Today I killed grandfather” (198). When Charles finally has it in his hands, he is literally holding the truth that has been under his nose for the entirety of the investigation.
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