A Twisted Tale

Continuing through the stories of Sherlock Holmes, I reached one that I think might be my favorite so far, "The Man With the Twisted Lip."

A woman enlists Holmes to determine what's become of her husband. On a chance outing in town, she spotted him in the upper window of an unfamiliar building, then watched as he seemed to fall back into the room -- as though pulled? She rushed in to find only his clothes and some blood on the window sill. Two witnesses in the building saw nothing of the man; one was behaving suspiciously enough for the police to arrest, but if indeed he committed a murder, there is no evidence of it. Holmes must first solve the nature of the crime itself before he can ferret out the culprit.

Several elements of this story really worked for me. The first was an interesting little side adventure that began the story. Watson is approached by a friend of his wife's, who wants him to retrieve her husband from an opium den. This is a "case" of an entirely separate nature from the main story itself. And while it's certainly not involved or mysterious, it is an adventure that Watson undertakes completely on his own, without Sherlock Holmes. (Though he does encounter Holmes along the way, setting the story proper into motion.) I enjoyed this taste of Watson working solo. It's not detective work by any stretch, but it does serve to make him a more self-sufficient character separate from Holmes. The sidekick takes center stage for a few pages.

Also of interest is the return of Holmes' skill as a master of disguise. If you've followed my comments on earlier Holmes stories, you may recall that I wasn't entirely enamored of this trait the first time around. I felt that its use in the plot made more of a mockery of Watson than a genius of Holmes. And to a certain extent, this is repeated here with Watson again unable at first to recognize his own friend.

This time around, however, Holmes' background in disguises is integral to the plot. And Arthur Conan Doyle cleverly reminds readers of this at the beginning of the story to foreshadow its importance at the resolution of the story. Spoiler alert here, should you care to skip the rest of this paragraph -- but when Sherlock Holmes himself is taken in for a time, I think it undoes some of the "damage." It turns out that perhaps Watson isn't that foolish, but rather that in the pages of Arthur Conan Doyle, everyone donning a disguise is wholly transformed.

I rate "The Man With the Twisted Lip" a B+. It's a fun little adventure built squarely in Holmes' wheelhouse, and I'm hoping for more like it to come.