The Man with the Twisted Lip
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| "The Man with the Twisted Lip" | |
|---|---|
| Author | Arthur Conan Doyle |
| Released | 1891 |
| Series | The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes |
| Client(s) | Mrs. St. Clair |
| Set in | 1889 |
| Villain(s) | None |
"The Man with the Twisted Lip", one of the 56 short Sherlock Holmes stories written by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is the sixth of the twelve stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The story was first published in the Strand Magazine in December 1891.
[edit] Synopsis
After rescuing a friend's husband from an East End opium den, Dr. Watson rather improbably finds his friend Sherlock Holmes there, disguised as an old man apparently trying to extract information from the addicts in the den.
Mr. Neville St. Clair, a respectable and punctual country businessman, has disappeared. Making the matter even more mysterious is that Mrs. St. Clair is quite sure that she saw her husband at a second-floor window in a rather rough part of town near the docks. He withdrew into the window immediately, and Mrs. St. Clair is quite sure that there was something very wrong.
Naturally, she tries to enter the building, but her way was blocked by a lascar. She fetches the police, but they cannot not find Mr. St. Clair. The window in which she saw her husband yields only a dirty, ugly beggar, well known to the police, by the name of Hugh Boone. The police are about to put this report down to madness of some kind when Mrs. St. Clair spots and identified a box of wooden bricks that her husband said he would buy for their son. A further search turns up some of her husband's clothes. Later, his coat, with the pockets full of several pounds' worth of pennies and halfpennies, is found in the Thames just below the building.
The beggar is arrested and locked up at the police station, and Holmes initially is quite convinced that Mr. St. Clair has been the unfortunate victim of murder. However, several days after Mr. St. Clair's disappearance, his wife receives a letter in his own writing. The arrival of this letter forces Holmes to reconsider his conclusions, leading him eventually to an extraordinary solution. Taking a bath sponge to the police station, Holmes washes Boone's still-dirty face, causing the mess to fall away and his face to be revealed — the face of Neville St. Clair! Upon Mr. St. Clair's immediate confession, this solves the mystery, and also creates a few problems.
It seems that Mr. St. Clair has been leading a double life, one of respectability, and the other as a beggar. In his youth, he had been an actor before becoming a newspaper reporter. In order to research an article, he had disguised himself as a beggar for a short time, during which he was given a very large amount of money. Later in his life, he returned to the street to beg for several days in order to pay a large debt. Given a choice between his newspaper salary and his high beggar earnings, he eventually became a professional beggar. His takings were large enough that he was able to establish himself as a country gentleman, marry well, and begin a respectable family. His wife never knew what he did for a living, but Holmes now requires Mr. St. Clair to explain all to his wife and to find a new job.
What the modern reader may find striking is the obvious fact that the use of narcotics was not illegal in the time of the story. Although the opium den operated quite openly and legally, the selling of opium or other drugs was in and of itself no crime in London of 1889, and nobody so considered it.
[edit] Wikisource links
| The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle |
|---|
| "A Scandal in Bohemia" — "The Red-Headed League" — "A Case of Identity" "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" — "The Five Orange Pips" — "The Man with the Twisted Lip" |
| Study in Scarlet — Sign of Four — Adventures — Memoirs — Hound of the Baskervilles — Return — Valley of Fear — His Last Bow — Case Book |
