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The Man with the Twisted Lip

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Brief overview

A missing gentleman turns out to be the beggar accused of his own murder.

  1. The victim and the suspect were one manHolmes sponges off the paint and scar to reveal Neville St. Clair asleep in the Bow Street cell.
  2. Begging paid far better than honest workSt. Clair earned twenty-six shillings and fourpence in his first seven hours and never took less than two pounds on a bad day, against two pounds a week as a reporter.
  3. Shame for his children kept the secret"It was not the wife, it was the children," he groans — he would have taken prison or execution rather than let them learn what their father did.
Executive Summary AI
  • Watson opens with Isa Whitney, an opium addict whose wife Kate begs him to fetch her husband from a den in Upper Swandham Lane after two days' absence.
  • In the den Watson finds Whitney and also Sherlock Holmes in disguise as a bent old man, working on the disappearance of Neville St. Clair.
  • Holmes lays out the case on the drive to Lee: last Monday Mrs. St. Clair saw her husband at a second-floor window of the den, found his toy box of bricks and all his clothes but the coat, blood on the sill, and the coat later dragged from the mud stuffed with 421 pennies and 270 half-pennies, while the cripple Hugh Boone and the Lascar manager denied everything.
  • At the Cedars Mrs. St. Clair produces a letter posted that day at Gravesend in her husband's hurried hand, enclosing his signet ring and telling her to wait in patience.
  • At Bow Street Holmes washes the sleeping prisoner's face with a bath-sponge and reveals Hugh Boone to be Neville St. Clair himself, a former reporter and actor who found begging paid over seven hundred pounds a year and who is let go on his oath that Hugh Boone will never appear again.
Key Quote
“My God, it's Watson”
— Isa Whitney
Key Quote
“Holmes, I whispered, what on earth are you doing in this den?”
— Watson
Key Quote
“Every pocket stuffed with pennies and half-pennies, 421 pennies and 270 half-pennies.”
— Sherlock Holmes

Transcript

0:00 VI.
0:24 THE MAN WITH THE TWISTED LIP Arthur Conan Doyle. Adventure 6. The Man with the Twisted Lip.
0:30 Isa Whitney, brother of the late Elias Whitney, D.D., principal of the Theological College of
0:37 St. George's, was much addicted to opium. The habit grew upon him, as I understand, from some foolish freak when he was at college,
0:48 for having read De Quincey's description of his dreams and sensations, he had drenched his tobacco
0:53 with laudanum in an attempt to produce the same effects. He found, as so many more have done,
0:59 that the practice is easier to attain than to get rid of, and for many years he continued to be a slave to the drug,
1:06 an object of mingled horror and pity to his friends and relatives. I can see him now,
1:12 with yellow, pasty face, drooping lids, and pinpoint pupils, all huddled in a chair,
1:20 the wreck and ruin of a noble man. One night, it was in June, eighty-nine, there came a ring to my bell,
1:28 about the hour when a man gives his first yawn and glances at the clock. I sat up in my chair,
1:34 and my wife laid her needlework down in her lap and made a little face of disappointment.
1:39 "'A patient,' said she, "'you'll have to go out.' I groaned, for I was newly come back from a weary day.
1:48 We heard the door open, a few hurried words, and then quick steps upon the linoleum. Our own door
1:55 flew open, and a lady, clad in some dark-coloured stuff with a black veil, entered the room.
2:01 You will excuse me calling so late, she began. And then, suddenly losing her self-control,
2:07 she ran forward, threw her arms about my wife's neck, and sobbed upon her shoulder.
2:12 Oh, I'm in such trouble, she cried. I do so want a little help.
2:16 Why, said my wife, pulling up her veil, it is Kate Whitney. How you startled me, Kate. I had
2:22 not an idea who you were when you came in. I didn't know what to do, so I came straight to you.
2:28 That was always the way.
2:30 Folk who were in grief came to my wife, like birds to a lighthouse.
2:35 It was very sweet of you to come.
2:37 Now, you must have some wine and water and sit here comfortably and tell us all about it.
2:42 Or should you rather that I send James off to bed?
2:46 Oh, no, no, I want the doctor's advice and help, too. It's about Isa. He has not been home for two days. I am so
2:52 frightened about him. It was not the first time that she had spoken to us of her husband's trouble,
2:58 to me as a doctor, to my wife as an old friend and school companion. We soothed and comforted
3:04 her by such words as we
3:05 could find. Did she know where her husband was? Was it possible that we could bring him back to her?
3:11 It seems that it was. She had the surest information that of late he had, when the fit
3:16 was on him, made use of an opium den in the farthest east of the city. Hitherto his orgies
3:22 had always been confined to one day, and he had come back, twitching and shattered in the evening.
3:27 But now the spell had been upon him eight and forty hours,
3:31 and he lay there, doubtless among the dregs of the docks,
3:34 breathing in the poison or sleeping off the effects.
3:38 There he was to be found, she was sure of it,
3:40 at the Bar of Gold in Upper Swandham Lane.
3:44 But what was she to do?
4:08 How could she, a young and timid woman make her way into such a place and pluck her husband out from among the ruffians who surrounded him and then, as a second thought, why should she come at all? I was Isa Whitney's medical advisor, and as such I had influence over him.

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