Stories / The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes · 1893
The Crooked Man
A colonel dies of terror in a locked room with a mongoose's tracks on the floor; the crooked man he betrayed decades ago had only to be seen.
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⚠️ Spoilers below. The analysis discusses the solution, including who did it and how it's found out.
Summary & analysis
Colonel Barclay dies of terror behind a locked door, his wife senseless beside him and a strange word — 'David' — overheard in the quarrel before; a club-footed animal's tracks cross the room, and the key is missing.
Holmes finds the couple's evening reconstructed by a lamplighter's-eye method: the wife's charity walk, her meeting with a twisted stranger, the drawing-room from the lawn. The stranger is traced through his mongoose — the tracks' owner — to a conjuror's lodging.
Henry Wood, betrayed into Sepoy hands decades ago by Barclay's false map — his rival for the same woman — returned crooked from torture; Barclay died of his own heart at the sight of him. 'David' resolves as scripture: Nancy's one-word verdict comparing her husband to the king who sent Uriah to die.
Deeper reading
A locked room with a biblical key
The Crooked Man dresolves an apparent murder into a death by shock and a decades-old betrayal, with the overheard word "David" unlocked not by forensics but by scripture — the King who sent a loyal soldier to die for a woman. Doyle rewards the literate reader, turning a single misheard name into the whole motive. The mongoose\'s tracks and the crooked stranger supply the gothic texture.
Empire's long debts
Like several Memoirs, the story\'s roots run back to India and the Mutiny, and its real subject is a wrong done long ago catching up with the man who profited from it. The canon repeatedly stages the imperial past returning to collect, and here the collection needs no violence at all — only for the betrayer to see the face he ruined.
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Techniques on display
Elimination
Striking out the impossible until the truth remains.
In this story: The locked room opens by inventory: with violence eliminated by the medical evidence, the death needs only a cause of terror and an exit for the key — and a third presence explains both.
Chronology
Laying events end to end until contradictions die.
Practise what this story preaches: every technique above links to a tool or game built on the same method. The best way to learn the canon is to reason along with it.