Sherlock Holmes Short Stoies :"The Man with the Twisted Lip"

"The Man with the Twisted Lip"
by Arthur Conan Doyle
Released	1891
Series	The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Client(s)	Mrs. St. Clair
Set in	1889
Villain(s)	None

"The Man with the Twisted Lip", one of the 56 short stories of Sherlock Holmes written by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle , is the sixth of the twelve stories in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes . The story was first published in the Strand Magazine in December 1891

Plot summary
Dr.Watson  is called upon late at night by a female friend. Her husband has been absent for several days and, as he is an opium addict, she is sure he has been indulging in a lengthy drug binge in a dangerous East End opium den. Frantic with worry, she seeks Dr. Watson's help in fetching him home. Watson does this, but he also finds his friend Sherlock Holmes in the den, disguised as an old man, trying to extract information about a new case from the addicts in the den.
Mr. Neville St. Clair, a respectable and punctual country businessman, has disappeared. Making the matter even more mysterious is that Mrs. St. Clair is quite sure that she saw her husband at a second-floor window of the opium den, in Upper Swandam Lane, a rather rough part of town near the docks. He withdrew into the window immediately, and Mrs. St. Clair is quite sure that there was something very wrong.
Naturally, she tries to enter the building, but her way was blocked by the opium den's owner, a Lascar. She quickly fetches the police, but they cannot find Mr. St. Clair. The room, in whose window she saw her husband, is that of dirty, disfigured beggar. well known to the police, by the name of Hugh Boone. The police are about to put this report down a mistake of some kind when Mrs. St. Clair spots and identifies a box of wooden bricks that her husband said he would buy for their son. A further search turns up some of her husband's clothes. Later, his coat, with the pockets full of several pounds' worth of pennies and halfpennies,is found in the Thames  just below the building.
The beggar is arrested and locked up at the police station, and Holmes initially is quite convinced that Mr. St. Clair has been the unfortunate victim of murder. However, several days after Mr. St. Clair's disappearance, his wife receives a letter in his own writing. The arrival of this letter forces Holmes to reconsider his conclusions, leading him eventually to an extraordinary solution. Taking a bath Sponge to the police station in a Gladstone Bag, Holmes washes Boone's still-dirty face, causing the mess to fall away and his face to be revealed — the face of Neville St. Clair! Upon Mr. St. Clair's immediate confession, this solves the mystery, and also creates a few problems.

The Man with the Twisted Lip

It seems that Mr. St. Clair has been leading a double life, one of respectability, and the other as a beggar. In his youth, he had been an actor before becoming a newspaper reporter. In order to research an article, he had disguised himself as a beggar for a short time, during which he was given a very large amount of money. Later in his life, he returned to the street to beg for several days in order to pay a large debt. Given a choice between his newspaper salary and his high beggar earnings, he eventually became a professional beggar. His takings were large enough that he was able to establish himself as a country gentleman, marry well, and begin a respectable family. His wife never knew what he did for a living, and Holmes agrees to preserve Mr. St. Clair's secret as long as no more is heard of Hugh Boone.
The story is unique among Holmes stories in two ways: when the mystery is resolved, it turns out that no crime has been committed and there is no villain; and unlike other stories, Holmes (or in fact, Doyle) does not explain how he solved the mystery, and leaves it to the intelligent reader to work out (the clue is fairly enough given in the story).

 Points of interest

What the modern reader may find striking is the obvious fact that the use of narcotics was not illegal in the time of the story. Although the opium den was an environment connected with crime and underworld, it operated quite openly and legally. The selling of opium  or other drugs was in and of itself no crime in the London of 1889, and nobody so considered it.
Another contention is that many Sherlockian mysteries have solutions based on seemingly unlikely events. The ability of St. Clair to earn a good living begging is considered by some to be such a plot point, but others disagree. For example in Toronto a woman known as the "shaky bag lady" did this very thing, surpassing the efforts of common beggars by presenting herself as more pathetic than legitimate beggars. The plot may have been suggested by Thomas Harman's A Caveat for Common Cursitors (1561) in which he describes the unmasking of the 'counterfeit crank' Nicholas Jennings, who begs by day displaying his false sores, while returning at night to a comfortable home with a housekeeper.