The Man with the Twisted Lip

Neville St Clair is a City man of very regular and respectable habits, which makes what his wife sees all the more alarming. Out shopping one day, she looks up at the window of an opium den in the East End and sees her husband inside, apparently out of his mind. That evening he does not come home. The police find blood in the room above the den and no sign of him, and Mrs St Clair consults Holmes, as any wife would, sure that her husband is not the sort of man to vanish without a word.

Nothing is quite that simple. The den is run by a Lascar who says little, and among its regulars is a beggar known as the man with the twisted lip, a wreck who does not look like anyone's idea of a murderer. Holmes, as ever, is more interested in the details that do not fit than the ones that do. The habits of a respectable family man are not the habits of an opium smoker, and somewhere between the City and the East End the truth has got lost. The case also gives the production a proper look at the East End, all gaslight and fog and faces you would cross the street to avoid, and at a side of London the respectable St Clair ought never to have known.

Patrick Lau directed, with Alan Plater, John Hawkesworth and Conan Doyle on the writing. Clive Francis gives St Clair a double life worth the watching, Eleanor David's Mrs St Clair is frantic without ever losing her nerve, and Denis Lill's Inspector Bradstreet does the heavy police work. Patricia Garwood and Terence Longdon are the Whitneys, Albert Moses is the Lascar, and Rosalie Williams keeps Baker Street running.

The twist, when it comes, is one of the great ones, and the episode trusts it enough not to rush it. For once the story ends in a reunion instead of an arrest, and it is the better for it. Watson is scandalised, Holmes is amused. And the viewer is left to wonder which of them is right.