Shooting moles suggests a dull life, no?
Crooked House (2017), a BBC production of an Agatha Christie novel of the same name, is an exploration of how the combination of extraordinary wealth and a domineering personality, the latter from someone we see only in brief flashbacks, can combine to overwhelm standard morality and produce offspring who view morality as a barrier to their acquisition of anything they want. It is, in fact, a condemnation of the old maxim The end justifies the means.
Murder is the mechanism through which we’re introduced to these offspring. Aristides Leonides may have been a midget, or so we infer from the remarks, but coming to England virtually penniless didn’t stop him from becoming one of the moneyed elite and marrying a beautiful woman. He had children with her, then she passed away, and, now elderly, he remarries, leading to children and grandchildren living in the same magnificent estate; even his first wife’s sister lives there.
But now he’s dead, his insulin replaced by his glaucoma medicine, resulting in it being injected, possibly accidentally, into him by his young wife. His youngest daughter has brought in the son of a Scotland Yard legend that she met in Cairo to help find the murderer, and soon everyone but the family dogs are suspects.
But the murder is almost incidental, because the real horrific aspect are the behaviors of everyone in the house. The nanny and the tutor may be the most normal, one indulging a memorable taste for hot chocolate, while the other cavorts with the old man’s wife – with, it’s rumored, his approval. But the eldest son, quite embittered at his father and, by extension, himself, and his wife indulge in, well, indulgent art and gambling, while the second son runs one of the family businesses – into the ground. His wife works on levering him out of the family, and by that measure may be the most normal of all.
And the grandchildren are the most alien. While their parents long for normalcy, forever denied them by their father, they embrace their strangely non-empathic lives, engaged in discovering what they want, and then pursuing it with little regard for decency. Only their youth and hormones are preventing their morphing into monsters.
Into this strides our detective, the aforementioned son of the Scotland Yard legend, and he’s got a good bit of lust going for his employer, the youngest daughter of the murdered man. Her demons are a little more elusive than her brothers’: a detachment from the emotions of the day, a willingness to play with the men in her life with no inclination to fully commit, leaving broken hulks in her wake. For the young private investigator, she’s both a distraction and a suspect.
But when an unexpected Last Will and Testament appears, granting the same daughter the bulk of his estate, the story accelerates out of control. She reveals she was being trained by her father to take over the family fortune, and that some of that training is the use of ruthlessness. But, for all that, when someone’s confession – or exultation – of murder appears, she is still stricken in grief as two members of the family find their doom.
One to protect the family by killing the other.
This story has plenty of twists and turns, although sometimes I felt I needed a scorecard to keep track of it all. But it was fun. And I watched it late enough at night that I had some associated nightmares.
Which says something, I suppose.
