In Three Gables, a house in London, lives three generations of the Leonidas family. Dominated by the patriarch Aristide, the family has its fair share of eccentricities – so much so that Aristide’s granddaughter, Sophie, considers it a Crooked House. At which point, everyone should have run screaming given that once you hear a reference to a nursery rhyme in a book from the 1940s, you know the murders are going to start soon…

Charles Hayward has returned from the war, determined to marry Sophie, but she refuses until the truth behind Aristides death – poisoned by his eye medicine – is resolved. She will happily marry Charles… provided that the right person killed her grandfather.

So, after They Came To Baghdad last month, it’s time for another Agatha Christie title that I’ve never read before. Now those of you who are acquainted with Dame Agatha’s canon might not be surprised at Baghdad’s omission, but this one might be more of a surprise. It’s very highly regarded and I was surprised given its reputation that it was pipped by Sparkling Cyanide in my Best Non-Poirot, Non-Marple and Non-Ten-People-Stuck-On-An-Island-Novel that I conducted a while ago. But I’ve never read it, because once upon a time it was spoiled for me.

And I’m talking probably forty years ago – either my sister read it and told me the ending or for some reason I read the last page first, but it’s the sort of thing one doesn’t forget. Some Christie novels are a complete blank in my head despite having read them relatively recently – I couldn’t tell you a thing about Ordeal By Innocence for example, but this has lingered in my head forever. And despite re-reading novels that I’d read before, for some reason I never picked this one up. Maybe I thought I’d forget the solution? Who knows, but anyway, that was never going to happen. So I decided the other day to grab my tattered first edition and give it a go.

While we’re talking about the book, boo to the previous owner who wrote a couple of notes about a plot hole in pencil. It wasn’t a plot hole, by the way, but at least they used pencil. The book has worse blemishes…

Anyway, this is a really good read. It’s interesting to see Christie using some very standard tropes to “hide” the murderer but because of the nature of this one, managing to get away with it. The sleuth – who admittedly does need to be told the solution – is a fairly traditional Christie hero. At least he’s been in love with one of the suspects since before the book started, rather than falling in love during the investigation.

It’s hard to say more without giving too much away but I did think that the fate of the murderer didn’t have quite the emotional kick that it was supposed to have. There’s also a little drag in the middle, as we go around various suspects who just don’t come across as being potential murderers – a bit of a whiff of a decent motive might have been nice, but every time one crops up, it gets knocked down pretty quickly.

But overall, this is a very good Christie with some interesting characters and an interesting idea at the heart of it. Definitely worth reading.