by JONATHAN BARNES [Times Literary Supplement] – The story begins as Dr Watson is summoned to Baker Street, “one Sunday evening early in September of the year 1903”, by means of a splendidly terse telegram (“Come at once if convenient – if inconvenient come all the same”) in order to hear an account of the mystery of Professor Presbury, “the famous Camford physiologist”. The Professor, a “staid, elderly” widower, has recently become engaged to a much younger woman and “the current of his life” has been disrupted. Formerly “the frankest of men”, his behaviour has turned “furtive and sly”. He “lives as in a strange dream”, ventures out on unexplained expeditions and receives envelopes in the post, “marked by a cross under the stamp”. The atmosphere in the house he lives in with his adult daughter Edith and his assistant Trevor Bennett has grown clammily oppressive, and matters reach a crisis when Bennett catches his employer in the middle of the night “crawling . . . on his hands and feet, with his face sunk between his hands” and hears him spit out “some atrocious word”. Edith, woken by the “frenzied barkings” of the family’s wolfhound, opens her eyes to see her father’s face looking in at her through the window of her bedroom on the second floor. Watson is inclined to dismiss the incidents as a consequence of advanced lumbago but Holmes is intrigued and insists that the pair travel to the Presbury home to investigate. The solution, when it comes, is strikingly outré. In preparation for his marriage, the Professor has been injecting himself with a “strength-giving serum” derived from a “black-faced Langur” in the hope of “rejuvenescence”. A side effect of the treatment has led to the development of simian characteristics, enabling him to dangle outside his daughter’s window and antagonize the dog. Holmes, in his summing up, opines that “the highest type of man may revert to the animal if he leaves the straight road of destiny”.

Continued at the TLS | More Chronicle & Notices.