Strange-looking man in the street. His hair was black, black as the night, he was all crooked and his voice was scary. I heard him shout: 'Nancy, my love, it's you!' My friend's face turned white as a ghost and she stood still like a statue. Then she looked at the man and said: 'I thought you were dead!

Contents.Synopsis 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. James Barclay, of based at, 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, as 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 more attached to his wife than she to him. They have also noticed that the Colonel sometimes had bouts of deep depression and moodiness for no apparent reason.As a married officer, the Colonel lived with his wife in a villa outside the camp at, and one evening Nancy went out in the evening with her next-door neighbor, Miss Morrison, on an errand connected with her church, and came 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, and 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.

Holmes, Watson and the 'Crooked Man'.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. Upon entering, 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, and also found, to his surprise, that the key was not in the locked door on the inside. Later, a thorough search failed to turn it up. A peculiar club-like weapon was also found in the morning room. Although the staff has seen the Colonel's weapon collection, they do not recognize this weapon.Holmes believes that the case is not what it initially appears to be.

Although the staff are quite sure that they only heard the Colonel's and his wife's voices, Holmes is convinced that a third person came into the room at the time of the Colonel's death and, rather oddly, made off with the key. This Holmes deduces from footmarks found in the road, on the lawn, and in the morning room. Odder still, the mystery man seems to have brought an animal with him. Judging from the footmarks it made, it is long with short stumpy legs, like a weasel or a stoat, but bigger than either of those animals.

It left claw marks on the curtain, too, leading Holmes to deduce that it was a carnivore, for there was a bird cage near the curtain.Holmes is sure that Miss Morrison holds the key to the mystery, and he is right. She claims to know nothing of the reason for the argument between her neighbors, but when Holmes tells her that Nancy could easily face a murder charge, she feels that she can betray her promise to her and tells all. On their short outing, the two women met a bent, deformed old man carrying a wooden box. He looked up at Nancy and recognized her, and she him.

Nancy asked Miss Morrison to walk on ahead as there was apparently a private matter to discuss with this man. She came back very angry, and made her friend swear not to say anything about the incident, claiming the man was a former acquaintance who had fallen on hard times.This breaks the case wide open for Holmes.

He knows that there cannot be many men of this description in the area, and soon identifies him as Henry Wood, and goes with Watson to visit him the next day in his room. Wood explains all. He had been a in the same regiment as Colonel Barclay, who was still a at that time, at the time of the, then known as the 'Mutiny'. Also at this time, he and Barclay were both vying for Nancy's hand.

Henry was not deformed, and much better looking in those days. The regiment was confined to its cantonment by the turmoil in, and water had run out, among other problems.

A volunteer was asked for, to go out and summon help, and Henry volunteered to do so. Sergeant James Barclay—later the Colonel—instructed Henry on the safest route to take. But as Henry traveled along the route, he was attacked and taken prisoner, being knocked unconscious in the process. When he came to, he gathered from what he knew of the local language, spoken by his captors, that Sergeant Barclay had betrayed him to the enemy, driven by one motive—to get rid of Henry so he could have Nancy for himself.

Henry was tortured repeatedly, which is how he became deformed, spent years as a slave or wandering, made money as a conjurer, and when he was getting old, he longed to come back to England. He sought out soldiers because he was familiar with the milieu.Then, quite by chance, he met Nancy that evening, who was shocked to learn he was alive.

Unknown to her, however, he followed her home and witnessed the argument, for the blinds were up and the glass door open. He climbed over the low wall and entered the room. An caused by the sight of him killed the Colonel instantly, and Nancy fainted. Hienry's first thought then was to open the inside door and summon help, and he took the key from the now-unconscious Nancy to do so. Realizing that the situation looked very bad for him and that he himself could be charged with murder, he chose instead to flee, stopping long enough to retrieve Teddy, his that he used in his conjuring acts, which had escaped from the wooden box.

Imagistic, SuspensefulSo, a mystery story that is all clues and no description would be like a laundry list: Discovered, (1) one beryl coronet missing (3) three beryls, in the (2) two hands of (1) one Arthur Holder. No one would read such a story. So one way that Conan Doyle slows down the reader to make him or her pay attention to what's happening is to throw in passages of dense imagery. Consider the atmosphere wrapped up in the following passage:The equinoctial gales had set in with exceptional violence. All day the wind had screamed and the rain had beaten against the windows, so that even here in the heart of great, hand-made London we were forced to raise our minds for the instant from the routine of life and to recognize the presence of those great elemental forces which shriek at mankind through the bars of civilization. (Orange.3)As the beginning of an unusually grim murder mystery for a Holmes story, this use of personal and introspective observation is particularly effective. Watson's narration doesn't wander off into these passages of thick description very often, which makes their impact all the more powerful when he does.The tone of Watson's narration is also suspenseful.

Suspense grows out of the awareness that we, the readers, know less about something than certain characters in a story do. And we're always going to know less than the great Sherlock Holmes.

As a first person narrator, Watson helpfully draws attention to what we don't know by regularly pointing out what he doesn't know: 'It was obvious to me that my companion's mind was now made up about the case, although what his conclusions were was more than I could even dimly imagine' (Coronet.168). Or 'What a tissue of mysteries and improbabilities the whole thing was!' Every time Watson exclaims over how little he understands, he emphasizes the huge gap between our knowledge and Holmes's – something that only increases our need to know how it's all going to come together in the end. Genre. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is actually not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's first publication featuring our favorite private consulting detective.

Nope, the novels A Study in Scarlet (1888) and The Sign of Four (1890) preceded this collection of twelve tales (by the way, all of Conan Doyle's Holmes stories and novels were published in magazines before they came out as books. But we're going by the book publication date rather than the magazine release). Still, it wasn't until Conan Doyle started publishing one Holmes-centered short story per month in the (then-new) pop fiction magazine The Strand (to learn more, see our 'In A Nutshell') that the character of Sherlock Holmes really took off in the public imagination.By the time this first run of twelve short stories was collected into one volume in 1892, Holmes had become such a blockbuster with the English reading public that The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes didn't need anything more than the character's name to sell. No longer did Conan Doyle have to rely on sexily mysterious titles like The Sign of Four to get his work into bookstores (though we have to acknowledge the two other Holmes novels in there, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and The Valley of Fear (1915)).All of Conan Doyle's later Holmes story collections, with the exception of His Last Bow (1917), relied on the name of the main character to bring in the big bucks, including The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894), The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1904), and The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (1927).

In fact, if you think about it, Holmes had become so famous as a character that Conan Doyle could feel confident titling a collection His Last Bow – trusting that the reading public would know that 'his' refers to our old friend Holmes. Holmes is like the late-nineteenth-century version of House: sure, each individual episode has its own mystery, its own plot, but you keep reading because you like the guy in the title.So how about the titles of Conan Doyle's individual stories? From July 1891 to June 1892, Conan Doyle supplied his eager reading public with 'A Scandal in Bohemia,' 'The Red-Headed League,' 'A Case of Identity,' 'The Boscombe Valley Mystery,' 'The Five Orange Pips,' 'The Man with the Twisted Lip,' 'The Speckled Band,' 'The Engineer's Thumb,' 'The Noble Bachelor,' 'The Beryl Coronet,' and 'The Copper Beeches.'

The title of these stories often names the Central Clue that Reveals All, without providing any other hints as to what it could mean – enticing you to read further.This formula became one of the characteristics of Conan Doyle's Holmes stories – consider his later short story titles from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, such as 'The Naval Treaty,' 'The Adventure of the Crooked Man,' and 'The Musgrave Ritual.' As with the individual stories we mentioned earlier, these names bring up a mysterious character (who is the man with the twisted lip?) or object (such as the five orange pips) that the story promises to explain. The title becomes another marketing device: if you want to know what the heck the Red-Headed League is, buy The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and read all about it.

Or at least check it out on Google Books. 221B Baker Street, London, the center of the British Empire, the late nineteenth centuryYou may have read in our 'Character Analysis' of Sherlock Holmes that we asked if Holmes might have been a real guy (the answer is no, by the way). We pointed out that Conan Doyle is always making these odd little self-conscious remarks about fiction: Holmes often tells Watson that reality produces way weirder stuff than the imagination of any author could cook up. But, of course, all of this is the product of Conan Doyle's imagination, so we guess that's a – joke?

Anyway, whether we're laughing or not, we have to admit that The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, while totally fictional, does go to a lot of trouble to look like reality. And one way it does this is through the setting.The apartment where Holmes and (sometimes) Watson live (the chronology jumps around) is absolutely filled with stuff: gold snuff cases, scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, an encyclopedia, a shoe filled with tobacco, Holmes's chemical apparatus, a sofa, a pipe-rack Seriously, you have to wonder how anyone gets into the room at all, it's so packed.

But having all of these things brought up to set the scene gives 221B Baker Street a sense of real, physical presence that makes it compelling to read about (and Sidney Paget's illustrations don't hurt).These endless details don't stop at the apartment: consider the regular cataloguing of the city of London as a whole: from Hyde Park and the Serpentine in 'The Noble Bachelor' to opium dens and the Thames in 'The Man With the Twisted Lip.' There's the fictional Saxe-Coburg Square of 'The Red-Headed League' mingled with the completely real St. George's Church in Hanover Square in, again, 'The Noble Bachelor.' And connecting all of these spaces are vivid descriptions of systems of transportation: the London Underground, hackney cabs, boats, and trains appear over and over again.And then there's the larger world that revolves around London: Mary Sutherland inherits money from her uncle Ned in Auckland, New Zealand, in 'A Case of Identity.'

Roylott spends time in India ('The Speckled Band'), John Turner and Charles McCarthy once lived in Australia ('The Boscombe Valley Mystery'), and Elias Openshaw spent time in the U.S. ('The Five Orange Pips'). Miss Rucastle and Mr. Fowler go so far as to immigrate to the island of Mauritius.

What we're getting at here is that this is a well-traveled bunch of people.The image of London that emerges in Sherlock Holmes's stories is of bustling economic prosperity at the center of a giant colonial empire. As for Holmes's sooty, crowded London, we get a glimpse of it in and in (very atmospheric). The empire giveth and it taketh away, though: colonialism brings men like John Turner vast amounts of cash, but it also introduces political (see 'The Five Orange Pips') and personal (see 'The Speckled Band') instability.

The British Empire brings floods of new things to London – jewels such as the Blue Carbuncle or the 39 beryls of the Beryl Coronet – but also then provides yet more opportunity for thieves like John Clay ('The Red-Headed League') and Sir Richard Burnwell ('The Beryl Coronet').As modes of transportation improve connections between different places, you also come to understand the huge criminal and moral threat of being able to disappear at will ('A Case of Identity,' 'The Noble Bachelor,' and even perhaps 'A Scandal in Bohemia'). Just as London is being enriched by its exploitation of other nations, it's also getting drained by poverty and begging (think of the opium dens of 'The Man With the Twisted Lip').In other words, late-nineteenth-century London is a cosmopolitan space – a huge city bringing together new populations, new commercial goods, and new forms of transportation into one giant hodgepodge of activity. Without trains to bring him to his cases, without objects like the Blue Carbuncle, and without groups of strangers to visit in disguise, where would Holmes be? He needs a city like London to be a detective at all. Holmes's setting and his job are part and parcel of the same thing: a sign both of London's growing wealth and its growing insecurity. Tough-o-Meter.

Variable and DistinctiveOK, we know, that sounds like a copout: what the heck kind of a style is 'variable'? But bear with us for a second.

Here's our logic: Watson is certainly the central narrator of the Holmes stories, which means he has total control over the arrangement of who says what and when. But Holmes tales are heavy on dialogue and, even more importantly, they contain lengthy testimony from other characters, often inflected with the accent of those characters.Let's take a look at 'The Noble Bachelor,' and the distinctive voice of Hatty Doran – or Mrs. Moulton, as she's known by this point:The next I heard of Frank was that he was in Montana, and then he went prospecting in Arizona, and then I heard of him from New Mexico.

After that came a long newspaper story about how a miners' camp had been attacked by Apache Indians, and there was my Frank's name among the killed. I fainted dead away, and I was very sick for months after (Bachelor.188)Mrs. Moulton's slang – 'I fainted dead away,' 'the next I heard' – is unlike that of any other character's. At the same time, the places she mentions are totally outside the experience of either Watson as the primary narrator or Holmes as the guy who talks the most in these stories. Let's compare her loose, emotional style with Holmes's analytical reasoning in the same tale:From the first, two facts were very obvious to me: the one that the lady had been quite willing to undergo the wedding ceremony, the other that she had repented of it within a few minutes of returning home.

Obviously something had occurred during the morning, then, to cause her to change her mind. What could that something be?

She could not have spoken to anyone when she was out, for she had been in the company of the bridegroom (Bachelor.203)Check out that 'What could that something be?' In the middle of the passage there. Holmes is using this rhetorical question both to illustrate his thought processes and as a teaching tool, to instruct Watson (and the reader) in his methods. Holmes's voice appears within a page of Doran's and probably covers as much space in the explanation as her testimony does. But the style of the two passages could hardly be more different: Hatty gives an emotional confession, while Holmes offers a careful description of his reasoning. Hatty is supplying the missing clues that Holmes needs to wrap everything up for Watson and for the readers.The contrast of these two passages shows us something interesting about the overall style of storytelling in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: Watson provides a frame for each story, an introductory series of paragraphs sketching some dialogue with Holmes or setting the scene of the investigation.

His own style, as we discussed in 'Tone,' is often heavy on the imagery when he gets going. But he never talks for very long at one time. Watson almost immediately hands over the actual telling of the story to Holmes's clients, to Holmes's suspects, and to Holmes himself. If you look at any of the twelve tales, you'll find that most of the narration doesn't belong to Watson at all.

Watson hates filling in background information. He'll even substitute newspaper copy rather than writing out his own version of events: see, for example, the 'Hotel Cosmopolitan Jewel Robbery' article ('The Blue Carbuncle.61).So why does The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes rely so heavily on first-hand testimony and distinctive, individual style? Well, we can't say for sure, but we think one reason might be the realism we mention in both Holmes's 'Character Analysis' and in 'Setting.' We love Watson, but who are you going to trust: Hatty Doran's story, or Hatty Doran's story filtered through another person? Watson is an amazingly laidback narrator: he brings together all the bits of information you need to know, but he otherwise appears pretty passive about letting the story unfold in many different voices – at least, until Holmes is ready to bring it all home. Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory. There are a lot of things in these twelve stories that seem like they should be symbols.

After all, when Julia Stoner's dying words are, 'It was the band! The speckled band!' (Band.50), you'd be forgiven for thinking that some kind of spotted ribbon is going to have some hidden meaning to the Stoner girls, that it'll symbolize family trust or something along that line. But no, the 'speckled band' is quite literal: Julia's last words indicate the snake that killed her.Or how about the Beryl Coronet? It's the title of one of the stories and everything. Surely it must symbolize, we don't know, wealth or power or excellent facial hair or something. But in fact, it's not the coronet as a whole that matters (beyond the ruin its loss would bring on Alexander Holder).

The coronet becomes almost mechanical, a tool for drawing out the greed of Sir George Burnwell and for proving the hidden worth of Arthur Holder. These are two cases that indicate something distinctive about objects in a detective story.In a novel focusing on character development, symbolism is usually another tool for the author to indicate psychological depth. Like, if you want to show that a character is really depressed, you might spend a lot of time describing the heavy black clothes she wears. Those black clothes would become symbols of mourning, misery, and melancholy.

Or if you wanted to symbolize a character's homesickness, you might draw attention to that one snow globe that says 'I.Heart. Vermont!' That your character brought with her from hometown. That snow globe would then be a symbol of all of her unresolved feelings for the place she left behind. In books that really emphasize character, things become a way of saying something about the people who own them.But detective stories don't handle objects this way. Things stop defining characters and start advancing the plot. They become tools for the storyteller to bring James Ryder to thieving (in 'The Blue Carbuncle') or Irene Adler to blackmail (the photograph in 'A Scandal in Bohemia').

Even an engineer's thumb can be reduced to mere proof that Victor Hatherley is telling the truth. The things in these stories are almost utilitarian (read: they provide a means to an end) – significant only as long as they are central to a Sherlock Holmes case. Once the mystery is exposed and the story unraveled, there's no magic left to the Blue Carbuncle, or to any of the numerous objects that come and go in Holmes's 221B apartment. Narrator Point of View. First Person (Peripheral Narrator)Watson, the narrator, is definitely a main character in these stories.

So why don't we call him a 'Central Narrator'? Because Watson is telling his own story, sure, but only insofar as that story relates to Mr. Sherlock Holmes. We never hear more than a paragraph or two of Watson's experiences when Holmes isn't around. Holmes is clearly the focus of Watson's storytelling, so Watson is a 'Peripheral Narrator,' then: he interprets the life of a close friend for us, the readers.

This makes Watson a biased narrator (how many times does he remind us of his simple faith in Holmes's abilities?) but probably not as biased as Holmes would be about himself. Here at Shmoop, we usually analyze a novel (or a single short story) in terms of its complication and then resolution. The characters go on some kind of journey, they progress, crisis comes, we all learn an important lesson of some kind, and that's the end of it. But because The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a short story collection, we can't really apply that formula. After all, Conan Doyle expressly designed these stories to be self-contained.

So there's not much development across stories within the Adventures (though there might be, arguably, across the trajectory of the entire collection of Sherlock Holmes novels and stories). See our detailed summaries for a precise description of the plot; for more analysis, check out our thoughts on 'Characters' and 'Themes.' . Plot Analysis. Here at Shmoop, we usually analyze a novel (or a single short story) in terms of its complication and then resolution. The characters go on some kind of journey, they progress, crisis comes, we all learn an important lesson of some kind, and that's the end of it. But because The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a short story collection, we can't really apply that formula.

Penguin magic. Gotham Underground #9. Birds of Prey Vol.

After all, Conan Doyle expressly designed these stories to be self-contained. So there's not much development across stories within the Adventures (though there might be, arguably, across the trajectory of the entire collection of Sherlock Holmes novels and stories). See our detailed summaries for a precise description of the plot; for more analysis, check out our thoughts on 'Characters' and 'Themes.'

. Three Act Plot Analysis. Here at Shmoop, we usually analyze a novel (or a single short story) in terms of its complication and then resolution. The characters go on some kind of journey, they progress, crisis comes, we all learn an important lesson of some kind, and that's the end of it.

But because The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a short story collection, we can't really apply that formula. After all, Conan Doyle expressly designed these stories to be self-contained. So there's not much development across stories within the Adventures (though there might be, arguably, across the trajectory of the entire collection of Sherlock Holmes novels and stories). See our detailed summaries for a precise description of the plot; for more analysis, check out our thoughts on 'Characters' and 'Themes.'