Crooked House / Скрюченный домишко. Книга для чтения на английском языке

Crooked House / Скрюченный домишко. Книга для чтения на английском языке

Agatha Christie

Чтение в оригинале (Каро)Detective story

Убит крепкий старик, глава семьи, который обеспечил состоянием всех многочисленных родственников. Кому выгодна его смерть? Разгадка где-то на поверхности, и следить за перепетиями сюжета читателю помогут подробные комментарии и словарь, данный в конце книги.

Agatha Christie / Агата Кристи

Crooked House / Скрюченный домишко. Книга для чтения на английском языке

Crooked House В© 1949

Agatha Christie Limited.

All rights reserved.

AGATHA CHRISTIEВ© and the Agatha Christie Signature are registered trade marks of Agatha Christie Limited in the UK and elsewhere.

В© РљРђР Рћ, 2019

Author’s Foreword

This book is one of my own special favourites. I saved it up for years, thinking about it, working it out, saying to myself: �One day, when I’ve plenty of time, and want to really enjoy myself—I’ll begin it!’ I should say that of one’s output, five books are work to one that is real pleasure. was pure pleasure. I often wonder whether people who read a book can know if it has been hard work or a pleasure to write? Again and again someone says to me: �How you must have enjoyed writing so and so!’ This about a book that obstinately refused to come out the way you wished, whose characters are sticky, the plot needlessly involved, and the dialogue stilted—or so you think yourself. But perhaps the author isn’t the best judge of his or her own work. However, practically everybody has liked so I am justified in my own belief that it is one of my best.

I don’t know what put the Leonides family into my head—they just came. Then, like Topsy �they growed’.

I feel that I myself was only their scribe.

Chapter 1

I first came to know Sophia Leonides in Egypt towards the end of the war. She held a fairly high administrative post in one of the Foreign Office departments out there.