A Crooked Tale

It's been almost half a year since I last read one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, but the impending third series of the BBC's excellent Sherlock put me in the mood to pick up where I left off. Unfortunately, where I left off was on "The Adventure of the Crooked Man," which turned out to be one of the most disappointing Holmes stories I've read.

Holmes is brought in by the police to investigate the death of a man, heard arguing with his wife by their servants just moments before dying of an apparent bash to the back of the head. But the wife has gone catatonic immediately following the incident, and is unable to explain what happened.

The case is a mix of elements used to better effect in previous tales. In particular, this story repackages a lot of "The Adventure of the Speckled Band." It's something of a locked room mystery, with a missing key figuring prominently in the tale. An animal also happens to figure into the story as with Speckled Band, though in an essentially incidental role here. And as in "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor," the entire case hinges on one secret conversation that the woman in question had with a strange man immediately prior to the mystery. (In fact, the relationship ultimately revealed between the woman and the strange man is essentially the same as well.)

The story is particularly dated among Holmes adventures, in that it relies upon the "frailty of woman" to make a mystery at all. The woman's catatonia following her husband's death has no true explanation other than the chauvinistic attitudes of the time. Without that device, there would be no mystery at all; the woman would simply tell her version of the tale, which could easily be proven or disproven.

But certainly the worst aspect of the short story by far is the fact that Holmes is utterly unnecessary in resolving it! It's implausible enough to begin with that the consulting detective is even brought in to investigate such an open and shut case. The police are not at all confounded or conflicted about what happened -- they found two people alone in a room, one dead. And over the course of the day in which Holmes investigates by his methods, the police coroner conducts an autopsy and is accurately able to determine exactly what happened to the victim. At the end of the tale, before Holmes is able to go to the police and reveal the full scope of what happened, an officer comes to him and tells him what happened. There are particulars behind the case which the police have not sussed out, but they're rather superfluous. Holmes' time feels rather wasted, and by extension, so does ours the readers.

If I were inclined to give a Sherlock Holmes adventure an F, this would probably be the one, but I find I can't quite bring myself to do it. It seems even at their worst, the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle aren't completely unsalvageable. I give it a D.