Henry Wood: Not a Disguise to the Lover

One of the best episodes of Granada's Sherlock Holmes is "The Adventure of the Crooked Man." 

Years earlier, Nancy DeVoy fell in love with Henry Wood. A fellow officer, James Barclay, was jealous of the relationship since he wanted Nancy for himself. He arranged for Henry to fall into enemy hands, a move that Nancy--who becomes his wife--later characterizes as resembling David's treatment of his general Uriah. 

Henry survives torture and mutilation and finds his way back to England. Thirty years have passed, but he encounters Nancy who recognizes him. He then confronts her husband who dies from the shock. Holmes's investigation doesn't uncover a murder but does clear Nancy of suspicious in her husband's death. 

I find it entirely believable that Nancy would recognize her past fiancee, despite the passage of time and physical damage. 

Whether or not a wife/fiancee would recognize her lover from years earlier is a question I've discussed with my mother since we both love mysteries, and mysteries often use such disguises, such as Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile. My mother believed that it depended entirely on the people involved. (After all, I'm not sure David McCallum ever changed!)

The wife in Death on the Nile, for instance, is rather self-absorbed. It's a little odd that she wouldn't recognize the man she married over twenty years earlier but the novel allows for that possibility. In Henry Wood's case, he could still retain the voice, speech patterns, and underlying facial bones of the man he once was, especially since--unlike the husband in Death on the Niles--he isn't attempting to hide himself. 

In this rather romantic tales (and Arthur Conan Doyle was a romantic!), the disguise is not from the lover but from the detectives. And the disguise is one that Conan Doyle and Christie relied on: people's assumptions about what they are going to see. 

It takes Holmes to see past the "crooked man" who uses magician tricks to entertain soldiers to the young soldier of the past, to connect that man to the man with whom Nancy fell in love.

Nancy never suffers a doubt.