The Crooked Man

Colonel Barclay and his wife are the model couple of their regiment. One summer evening she comes home from a church meeting, shuts herself in the morning room, and the servants hear her shouting at him that he is a coward and to give her back her life. Then a crash and a scream. The colonel lies dead with a look of pure horror on his face, the door key is missing, and on the curtain are the footprints of a creature nobody can name.

What happens in The Crooked Man

Late one summer night, a few months after Watson’s marriage, Holmes turns up at his door, deduces a few details of his household, and asks to stay. He explains the case he is working on. Colonel James Barclay of the Royal Munsters, an Irish regiment stationed at Aldershot, rose from the ranks and married Nancy Devoy, a colour-sergeant’s daughter, over thirty years ago. They seemed devoted, though he was given to sudden black moods and hated being left alone after dark. On Monday evening Mrs. Barclay went to a church meeting with a young neighbour, Miss Morrison, and returned upset. She went into the morning room, called for tea, and when her husband joined her, the servants heard her shouting ‘You coward!’, and the maid had earlier heard her say the name David twice. Then came a cry, a crash and a scream. The door was locked from inside. The coachman got in through the open French window and found Mrs. Barclay senseless and the colonel dead, his face fixed in terror, with a wound on the back of his head and a strange carved club beside him. The key was gone. The police suspect the wife, who has brain fever and cannot speak. Holmes reasons that someone else must have taken the key, so a third person came in through the window. On the lawn he found a man’s footprints and, more puzzling, tracks of a long, low animal that had run up the curtain toward a canary’s cage. He pressed Miss Morrison, who admitted that on the way home they had met a hunchbacked man in Hudson Street who cried out ‘My God, it’s Nancy!’ Mrs. Barclay said she had thought him dead for thirty years, spoke with him alone, and swore Miss Morrison to secrecy. Holmes tracked the man down: Henry Wood, a travelling conjurer just back from India who carries an animal in a box and paid his rent with a rupee. The next day Holmes and Watson visit Wood, and Holmes warns him Mrs. Barclay may be tried for murder. Wood tells his story. He and Barclay were both in the regiment in India during the Mutiny, and Nancy loved Wood. During the siege of a place he calls Bhurtee, Wood volunteered to slip out for help, and Barclay, who planned his route, betrayed him to the rebels. Wood was tortured, crippled, and wandered for years among the hill peoples and the Afghans, earning his bread with conjuring tricks, while Barclay married Nancy. On Monday he followed her home, saw the quarrel through the window, and burst in. Barclay saw him and fell dead from the shock, striking his head on the fender. Wood took the key from Nancy’s hand, then fled after catching his pet mongoose, Teddy, who had run up the curtain. As they leave, Major Murphy tells them the inquest has found death by apoplexy, so Mrs. Barclay is cleared. Walking to the station, Holmes explains ‘David’: Nancy was comparing her husband to King David, who sent Uriah to die in battle in order to take Bathsheba.

Where and when The Crooked Man happens

Timeline the story arc, beat by beat

1. The opening
   A late caller

   Holmes arrives at Watson’s home near midnight, reads his household from small signs, and asks him to come to Aldershot.

2. The crime
   ‘You coward!’

   The servants hear Mrs. Barclay berating her husband through a locked door, then find him dead and her senseless.

3. The evidence
   Tracks on the curtain

   With the key missing, Holmes finds the footprints of an intruder and of a strange long-bodied animal.

4. The witness
   Meeting in Hudson Street

   Miss Morrison reveals that a deformed man recognised Mrs. Barclay in the street that evening and she called him Henry.

5. The confrontation
   Henry Wood’s story

   Holmes finds Wood, a conjurer back from India, who tells how Barclay betrayed him to the rebels during the Mutiny.

6. The truth
   A just providence

   Wood explains that Barclay dropped dead at the sight of him and that his mongoose Teddy made the tracks.

7. The end
   David and Uriah

   The inquest rules death by apoplexy, and Holmes explains that ‘David’ was Nancy’s biblical charge against her husband.

Characters and how they connect

Character Relationships who connects to whom, and the themes that bind them

Themes in The Crooked Man what the story is really about

Symbols & motifs

Conflicts

Literary devices

The deduction chain

Holmes reasons in steps. The door key is nowhere in the room or on either Barclay, so someone else took it, and the only way in was the open window. On the lawn he finds a man’s footprints, deep at the toe as if running, and beside them an animal’s tracks: a long body on short legs, able to climb a curtain, going for a canary, so a meat-eater like a stoat but bigger. Mrs. Barclay left home on good terms and came back furious, so something happened on the walk, and Miss Morrison was with her the whole time, so Miss Morrison must know. Her story of the hunchback leads Holmes to a deformed civilian in a garrison town, easy to trace, and the landlady’s talk of a strange animal and an Indian rupee confirms it. Only the word ‘David’ defeats him until the end.

Embedded narrative

Most of the story is told twice over in other voices: Holmes’s late-night account, Miss Morrison’s statement inside it, and Wood’s confession, which carries the reader back thirty years to India.

Biblical allusion

Nancy’s cry of ‘David’ refers to the story in the second book of Samuel in which King David sends Uriah to the front line to be killed so he can marry Bathsheba, an exact match for Barclay’s crime.

Red herring

The carved club, the locked door and the wife’s violent words all point to murder by Mrs. Barclay, when in fact no one struck the colonel at all.

Self-aware narration

Holmes teases Watson that his stories impress readers only by hiding key facts, and then admits that the clue of ‘David’ escaped him, so Doyle lets the detective comment on the form he lives in.

Important quotes

The ending of The Crooked Man, explained

The mystery ends without a crime in the legal sense. Henry Wood tells Holmes that when he burst into the room, Barclay looked at him with a horror Wood had never seen in a man and fell dead, cutting his head on the fender, before anyone touched him. The bare sight of the man he had betrayed, Wood says, was like a bullet through his guilty heart. Nancy fainted, and Wood took the key from her hand meaning to unlock the door and call help, then thought better of it, pocketed the key, dropped his stick, and ran after catching Teddy, the mongoose who had gone up the curtain after the canary. The carved club the police found was simply Wood’s stick. Holmes tells Wood he will be needed only if Mrs. Barclay is in danger, and otherwise there is no point raking up the scandal against a dead man. Then Major Murphy reports that the inquest has found the colonel died of apoplexy, which clears Mrs. Barclay and makes Wood’s evidence unnecessary. Barclay’s betrayal will never become public. The final exchange explains the word the maid overheard. Nancy, having learned from Wood how her husband won her, called him David, because King David in the Bible sent his loyal soldier Uriah to die in battle and then married Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba. Holmes admits that an ideal reasoner would have solved the case from that word alone. The ending suggests a kind of justice without courts: the colonel is punished by thirty years of remorse and by the shock that kills him, and Holmes judges that enough.

Common misreadings

Test yourself

A colonel is found dead in a locked room after his wife was heard yelling that he was a coward. The key is missing, and there are footprints of a man and a strange small animal. Holmes finds out the wife met a twisted, crippled man that evening, someone she thought had died thirty years before. His name is Henry Wood. Long ago in India, he and the colonel loved the same woman, and the colonel secretly let the enemy capture Henry so he could marry her. When Henry burst into the room that night, the colonel was so shocked that he dropped dead. The animal was Henry’s pet mongoose. Nobody is punished, and Holmes keeps the old secret quiet.

Flashcards flip, self-grade, and the deck remembers what you know

Compare & connect the story universe

Adaptation. The Crooked Man (1984, Television episode).

Discussion & essay prompts for class, or your next paper

Key questions students ask

• What happened to Colonel Barclay in The Crooked Man
• Who is Henry Wood in Sherlock Holmes
• Why did Mrs Barclay call her husband David
• What animal was in The Crooked Man
• Does Holmes say Elementary in The Crooked Man
• How did Barclay betray Henry Wood