Five Tuesdays in April should allow me to finish off the last five stories in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894). Right?

So, let’s get down to it with…

‘The Crooked Man’ (1893)

The Case

What possible sequence of events could see a loving wife turn on her husband and apparently strike him down dead? When Mrs. Nancy Barclay returns home from a brief charitable visit and locks herself away in a room with her husband Colonel James Barclay, it’s not long before raised voices bring the servants running and, with a scream and a thump, all goes quiet. When entrance is gained to the room, Mrs. Barclay has fainted, the Colonel is dead, and unusual footprints litter the room. What has happened? Where is the key to the locked door? And who was the “David” the couple were heard discussing? Enter Mr. Sherlock Holmes…

The Characters

Colonel James Barclay, British Army, ret’d; under-handed.

Mrs. Nancy Barclay, wife of the above; winner of a silver medal.

Henry Wood, a crooked man; an honest man.

The Timeline

We are “a few months after [Watson’s] marriage” and the good doctor is no longer rooming in Baker Street. I’ve lost track of the timeline at this point; I never really cared about it in the first place, if I’m honest. Why did I make this section a feature of these posts? I’m really not the man to pay close attention to that sort of thing. God, I hate me.

The Tropes

Thin beer here. A deduction about British workmen in the house — because no-one else wore nailed boots…? — and a brief insight into Watson’s habits when on his rounds, but nothing meaningful. It is here, though, that we get the following classic exchange:

“Excellent!” I cried.

“Elementary,” said he.

So that’s nice.

Points of Interest

It’s indicative that someone was in the military when they carry a handkerchief in their sleeve. Why did military men do this? Answer on a hanky, please, to be plucked from your sleeve and waved at a passing train.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned previously that Doyle seemed to be aware that he wasn’t writing what we’d now call fair play detective fiction, and the above quote goes on to discuss this matter:

“The same may be said, my dear fellow, for the effect of some of these little sketches of yours, which is entirely meretricious, depending as it does upon your retaining in your own hands some factors in the problem which are never imparted to the reader.”

True, the Victorian appetite for bringing the reader in on the solution ahead of time was evidently not ravening, but there is at least some solid recognition of it as an option here a good 20+ years before it was due to become the new gold standard.

Part of me would have been interested in seeing Holmes run Henry Wood to ground, rather than simply being told that he’d already done it. True, as he says, “a deformed man was sure to have attracted attention” and so there mightn’t have been much to it, but a story in which we seem Holmes and Watson investigate the whereabouts of this man then question him might have made this stand out a little more.

I like the inclusion of the mongoose. It adds nothing meaningful to the story, but it gives Henry Wood a little more life beyond him being the catalyst for this tragedy. Like, how would a man thus deformed go about earning a wage of any sort? Doyle’s paying attention to perhaps the wrong details here, but it pleases me to have this addressed.