The Adventure of the Crooked Man

"The Adventure of the Crooked Man"
The "Crooked Man" recognizes Nancy Barclay, 1893 illustration by Sidney Paget
Author	Arthur Conan Doyle
Series	The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
Publication date	1893

"The Adventure of the Crooked Man", one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by British author 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" fifteenth in a list of his nineteen favourite Sherlock Holmes stories.

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. 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 rather more attached to his wife than she to him. It also hasn’t escaped their notice that the Colonel sometimes had bouts of deep depression and moodiness for no apparent reason.

As a married officer, the Colonel and his wife lived in a villa outside the camp at Aldershot, and one evening, Nancy went out in the evening with her next-door neighbour Miss Morrison on an errand connected with her church, coming 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. 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. 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. He also found, to his surprise, that the key was not in the locked door on the inside, either. Later, a thorough search failed to turn it up.