A Case of Identity
short story by Arthur Conan Doyle
"A Case of Identity" is one of the 56 short Sherlock Holmes stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and is the third story in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It first appeared in The Strand Magazine in September 1891.
Plot
Mary Sutherland, a working-class girl who possesses a generous income as a result of a bequest from a relative, comes to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson for help after her fiancé, Hosmer Angel, disappears on their wedding day. Angel, Holmes learns, was a quiet and secretive man who always wore a pair of tinted glasses, had a thick beard and mustache, and would not give Sutherland his address, insisting that she leave letters at the local post office instead. He would only meet her when her disapproving stepfather, James Windibank, was out of the country on business, and he wrote letters to her exclusively on a typewriter.
Holmes easily deduces that Windibank and Angel are the same person. Windibank knew that he could only benefit from his stepdaughter's income while she remained unmarried, and so he hatched a plan to keep her single indefinitely. As "Hosmer Angel", he successfully sought her hand; he then engineered Angel's disappearance before the marriage could take place. As he had hoped, Sutherland remained loyal to Angel, saying she could never love another.
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This entry incorporates text from “A Case of Identity” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.