The Creeping Man

Edith Presbury sees a large, hulking figure silhouetted in her upstairs bedroom window, and her dog howls all night. Watson calls the business trivial. Holmes, who has never met a case he could not make interesting, takes a different view, and the reader is well advised to side with him.

But the prowler is only one strand of the affair. Several apes have recently been stolen from a travelling show, and Professor Presbury, Edith's father, has started behaving so oddly that his own household is frightened of him. Holmes links the three things together and arrives at an answer he does not enjoy giving. The figure at that upstairs window was the professor himself, and the missing apes have something to do with experiments he has been conducting in secret. What sort of experiments, and why a distinguished academic would be creeping about his own house at night, is the kind of question a household would rather not ask.

The explanation, when it comes, is pure science and pure vanity. Holmes lays it out with his usual gloomy satisfaction while the professor's dignity dissolves around him, and everyone at the house is left to pick up the pieces. There is something almost sad about the whole business, which is not what you expect from a story that begins with a monster at a bedroom window.

Robin Chapman wrote it, Tim Sullivan directed. Charles Kay gives Professor Presbury the right mixture of eminence and alarm, Sarah Woodward is Edith, and Anna Mazzotti plays Alice Morphy. Adrian Lukis is Jack Bennett, with James Tomlinson, Peter Guinness and Steve Swinscoe adding local colour, and Colin Jeavons doing his dependable turn as Inspector Lestrade. Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke are Holmes and Watson, with Hardwicke earning his keep as the voice of ordinary sense.

The Creeping Man is a small, odd story, and the series plays it with a straight face, which is exactly right. Science has an answer for everything. That was the professor's mistake.