James murray was a snowy-whiskered Victorian multi-linguist who spent half his life compiling and editing the Oxford English Dictionary in a 50ft corrugated shed at the bottom of his Oxfordshire garden.

The OED is arguably the greatest lexicon of the language and it represented a labour of love for Dr Murray, a man who spoke or understood 24 languages and who once almost drowned himself trying out a pair of water-wings he'd invented.

He was appointed editor of the OED in 1878 by Henry Liddell, father of the real-life Alice, of Wonderland fame, and spent the next 36 years overseeing the dictionary's slow development.

With his dark frock coats and Father Christmas beard, Murray cut a sober Establishment figure on the streets of Oxford, but the dictionary's hundreds of contributors came from far and wide, sometimes turning up in person at the doctor's corrugated workplace to offer their lists of words for inclusion.

But one hard-working contributor, who called himself Dr WC Minor and gave his address as Crowthorne, Berkshire, never showed up once in 12 years of submitting lists, words and indices.

There was a perfectly valid reason for this: Dr William Minor was a patient at the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. In his just-published book, The Surgeon of Crowthorne, author Simon Winchester examines the extraordinary relationship which evolved between Murray and Minor.

After serving as a surgeon in the American Civil War, the balance of Minor's mind became disturbed. He started to show signs of paranoia and developed a morbid and uncontrollable appetite for sex.

After a spell in a Washington asylum, Minor was discharged and came to London for a rest cure.

Here, he became convinced people were breaking into his lodgings at night and took to sleeping with a loaded Colt revolver by his side. One night, certain that he'd seen a man at the foot of his bed, the crazed doctor chased the shadow downstairs and opened fire. When the pistol had stopped smoking, it emerged that Minor had shot and killed an innocent brewery worker who just had the bad luck to be passing at the time. Minor was judged insane and sent to Broadmoor, where he remained until 1910. But for 20 years, his life was given meaning by his continuing contributions to Murray's magnum opus.

The Oxford man struck up a friendship with the American surgeon and visited him regularly at his two connecting book-lined rooms in Block Two at Broadmoor.

Words were what brought the two of them together, the Establishment figure and the outcast, and words were to be the glue in their friendship until William Minor's delusions finally overwhelmed him and he could no longer contribute.

He was released from Broadmoor and taken back to the United States by his brother. He died in 1920.

As for Dr Murray, with the aid of his loyal band of helpers, he managed to reach the letter T before his death in 1915, overcoming countless setbacks along the way, including failing health, mice, damp and the loss of the entire letter F, which was inadvertently shipped to Florence and mislaid.

The Surgeon of Crow-thorne is a tale of madness, murder, courage, kindness and redemption - all of which went towards creating one of the world's greatest reference books.

The Surgeon of Crow-thorne, by Simon Winchester, is published by Viking at £10.

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