The Man With The Twisted Lip By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Literary texts in which London is the primary setting often discuss the crime that exists within the city. In some, such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’, crime and its prevalence in London drives the central storyline. In others, crime feeds into the overall representation of the city that the text presents, as in John Gay’s Trivia, or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London. By writing the city in relation to the crime within, both Gay and Doyle create a London that by its nature enables and aids crime, and use its presence to facilitate the distinct messages within their texts.

A crime that reaches Sherlock Holmes is not just a broken law, but a mystery. Trivia locates patterns to form functional solutions, while Doyle creates a world of disguises, drugs, and intrigue, in which the answer is never the obvious or expected. The facts presented are not the definite, or even likely, conclusion. This is apparent in the story’s mystery, in which the wife of Neville St. Clair witnessed what appeared to be her husband’s murder, leading to the arrest of a beggar, Hugh Boone, who was found at the scene of the crime. However, Sherlock Holmes deduces that Boone and St. Clair are the same man, revealing that St. Clair had been commuting to the city to beg rather than work and had allowed his own arrest to protect his ruse. This case, which Sherlock remarks, ‘looked at the first glance so simple yet [presents] such difficulties’, reveals the very nature of the Sherlock Holmes crime: a diversion of the expected, or, more simply, a mystery. It is no coincidence that St. Clair’s secrets are both aided and revealed by his presence in London. In Kent he is one man and in London another, for London by its multifaceted and complex nature allows for the disappearance, recreation, and re-emergence of man. Had St. Clair’s wife not entered the city, he would not have been discovered in the act of recreation, and Mrs St.