The Adventure of the Crooked Man


"The Adventure of the Crooked Man", one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is one of 12 stories in the cycle collected as The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle ranked "The Adventure of the Crooked Man" 15th in a list of his 19 favourite Sherlock Holmes stories.

Synopsis

Holmes calls on Watson late one evening to tell him about a case that he has been working on, and also to invite him to be a witness to the final stage of the investigation. Colonel James Barclay, of The Royal Mallows based at Aldershot Camp, is dead, apparently by violence, and his wife, Nancy, is the prime suspect. The Colonel's brother officers are quite perplexed at the Colonel's fate, as most of them have always believed that he and Nancy were a happy couple. They have observed over the years, however, that the Colonel seemed more attached to his wife than she to him. They have also noticed that the Colonel sometimes had bouts of deep depression and moodiness for no apparent reason.
As a married officer, the Colonel lived with his wife in a villa outside the camp at Aldershot, and one evening Nancy went out in the evening with her next-door neighbor, Miss Morrison, on an errand connected with her church, and came back not long afterwards. She went into the seldom-used morning room and asked the maid to fetch her some tea, which was unusual for Nancy. Hearing that his wife had returned, the Colonel joined her in the morning room. The coachman saw him enter, and that was the last time that he was seen alive.
The morning room's blinds were up, and the glass door leading out onto the lawn was open. When the maid brought the tea, she heard an argument in progress between Nancy and her husband, and she heard Nancy say the name "David". She fetched the other maid and the coachman, who came and listened. Nancy was very angry and shouting about what a coward her husband was; his words were softer and less distinct. Suddenly, the Colonel cried out, there was a crash, and Nancy screamed.
Realizing that something awful had just happened, the coachman tried to force the locked door, but could not. He remembered the outside glass door, and went outside to get into the room through that. Upon entering, he found that Nancy had fainted, and the Colonel was lying dead in a pool of his own blood. The coachman summoned the police and medical help, and also found, to his surprise, that the key was not in the locked door on the inside. Later, a thorough search failed to turn it up. A peculiar club-like weapon was also found in the morning room. Although the staff has seen the Colonel's weapon collection, they do not recognize this weapon.
Holmes believes that the case is not what it initially appears to be. Although the staff are quite sure that they only heard the Colonel's and his wife's voices, Holmes is convinced that a third person came into the room at the time of the Colonel's death and, rather oddly, made off with the key. This Holmes deduces from footmarks found in the road, on the lawn, and in the morning room. Odder still, the mystery man seems to have brought an animal with him. Judging from the footmarks it made, it is long with short stumpy legs, like a weasel or a stoat, but bigger than either of those animals. It left claw marks on the curtain, too, leading Holmes to deduce that it was a carnivore, for there was a bird cage near the curtain.
Holmes is sure that Miss Morrison holds the key to the mystery, and he is right. She claims to know nothing of the reason for the argument between her neighbors, but when Holmes tells her that Nancy could easily face a murder charge, she feels that she can betray her promise to her and tells all. On their short outing, the two women met a bent, deformed old man carrying a wooden box. He looked up at Nancy and recognized her, and she him. Nancy asked Miss Morrison to walk on ahead as there was apparently a private matter to discuss with this man. She came back very angry, and made her friend swear not to say anything about the incident, claiming the man was a former acquaintance who had fallen on hard times.
This breaks the case wide open for Holmes. He knows that there cannot be many men of this description in the area, and soon identifies him as Henry Wood, and goes with Watson to visit him the next day in his room. Wood explains all. He had been a corporal in the same regiment as Colonel Barclay, who was still a sergeant at that time, at the time of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, then known as the 'Mutiny'. Also at this time, he and Barclay were both vying for Nancy's hand. Henry was not deformed, and much better looking in those days. The regiment was confined to its cantonment by the turmoil in India, and water had run out, among other problems. A volunteer was asked for, to go out and summon help, and Henry volunteered to do so. Sergeant James Barclay—later the Colonel—instructed Henry on the safest route to take. But as Henry traveled along the route, he was attacked and taken prisoner, being knocked unconscious in the process. When he came to, he gathered from what he knew of the local language, spoken by his captors, that Sergeant Barclay had betrayed him to the enemy, driven by one motive—to get rid of Henry so he could have Nancy for himself. Henry was tortured repeatedly, which is how he became deformed, spent years as a slave or wandering, made money as a conjurer, and when he was getting old, he longed to come back to England. He sought out soldiers because he was familiar with the milieu.
Then, quite by chance, he met Nancy that evening, who was shocked to learn he was alive. Unknown to her, however, he followed her home and witnessed the argument, for the blinds were up and the glass door open. He climbed over the low wall and entered the room. An apoplectic fit caused by the sight of him killed the Colonel instantly, and Nancy fainted. Henry's first thought then was to open the inside door and summon help, and he took the key from the now-unconscious Nancy to do so. Realizing that the situation looked very bad for him and that he himself could be charged with murder, he chose instead to flee, stopping long enough to retrieve Teddy, his mongoose that he used in his conjuring acts, which had escaped from the wooden box. However, he did drop his stick, the strange weapon that was later found, and he inadvertently carried the key off with him.
An inquest has already exonerated Nancy, having found the cause of the Colonel's death—apoplexy.
As for "David", this was apparently a reproach in which Nancy likened her husband to the biblical king, who had Bathsheba's husband Uriah transferred to a zone with heavy fighting so that he would be killed, leaving David free to marry Uriah's wife.

Commentary

"Elementary, my dear Watson" is an often quoted line from Sherlock Holmes. However, Holmes never says this in any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. In The Adventure of the Crooked Man, though, he comes his closest to it:
The Granada Television version reverses the oft-quoted "Elementary, my dear Watson" by ending with Watson deducing that Holmes had looked up a passage in the Bible since they returned home from Aldershot. When Holmes asks Watson how he knew he replies "Elementary, my dear Holmes" after explaining how he reached his conclusion.
The exact date of this story's setting is unknown, but since Nancy has been married for "upward of thirty years" and the Indian Rebellion broke out in 1857, the date would seem to be sometime after 1887. The first few lines by Watson tell that this story occurred in the "summer" just after his marriage which was in 1889; thus summer of 1889 would be about right.

Publication history

"The Adventure of the Crooked Man" was first published in the UK in The Strand Magazine in July 1893, and in the US in Harper's Weekly on 8 July 1893. It was also published in the US edition of The Strand Magazine in August 1893. The story was published with seven illustrations by Sidney Paget in the Strand. It was included in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, which was published in December 1893 in the UK and February 1894 in the US.

Adaptations

Film and television

The story was adapted as a 1923 silent short film as part of the Stoll film series. It starred Eille Norwood as Holmes and Hubert Willis as Watson, and featured Gladys Jennings as Mrs Barclay and Dora De Winton as Miss Morrison.
The Granada TV version with Jeremy Brett is faithful to the original — except that it has the housekeeper, instead of the coachman, tell Holmes of the clue of the missing key. It also hints that the "Mallows" are a "Lancers" regiment and that Barclay owed most of his rapid rise in ranks from Sergeant to Officer due at least in part to his marriage to the daughter of the regimental sergeant major — rather than merit, as Murphy was already a young sub-officer at the time Barclay was a Sgt; at the time of the story Murphy is still only a major in "temporary" command of the regiment. It starred Norman Jones as Henry Wood, Lisa Daniely as Nancy Barclay, Denys Hawthorne as James Barclay, Fiona Shaw as Miss Morrison, Paul Chapman as Major Murphy, Shelagh Stephenson as Jane, Michael Lumsden as young Henry Wood, Catherine Rabett as young Nancy, and James Wilby as young Barclay.
Holmes describes this case to his addiction group in the episode "A Giant Gun, Filled with Drugs" in the CBS TV series Elementary.

Radio

adapted the story as an episode of the radio series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes which aired on 1 December 1930, with Richard Gordon as Sherlock Holmes and Leigh Lovell as Dr. Watson.
Edith Meiser also adapted the story as an episode of the radio series The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, with Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson, that was broadcast on 10 November 1940.
Michael Hardwick dramatised the story as a 1966 BBC Light Programme radio adaptation. It starred Carleton Hobbs as Holmes and Norman Shelley as Watson.
"The Crooked Man" was dramatised for BBC Radio 4 in 1992 by Bert Coules as part of his complete radio adaptation of the canon, starring Clive Merrison as Holmes and Michael Williams as Watson, and featuring Brian Blessed as Henry Wood and Terence Edmond as Major Murphy. This adaptation contains a twist to the end of the denouement scene: after Holmes has left the room, Watson advises Wood to wait a while and then return to Nancy Barclay, that his disfigurement will not matter to her. Wood answers ambiguously, and the matter is left unresolved.
The story was adapted as an episode of the Imagination Theatre radio series The Classic Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, starring John Patrick Lowrie as Holmes and Lawrence Albert as Watson. The episode aired in 2015.