I’ll be uploading rankings of Sherlock Holmes stories from my new book, Wherever Fact May Lead Me: A Ranking of the Sherlock Holmes Stories, every day till we reach the best story. After that, I’ll share my ranking of the best villains in the Holmes canon. You can find the rankings on my website, and you can buy a copy of the book on Amazon.
Ranking the Sherlock Holmes Stories
22. The Adventure of the Dancing Men (December 1903, Return)
Perhaps the occultist and spiritualist Doyle had been reading about Egyptian hieroglyphics when he wrote The Adventure of the Dancing Men, or perhaps he’d been reading of the Orient’s written languages, for the childlike little figures, which each stand for letters, seem more related to pictoral writing than to alphabets. Or, perhaps he’d been perusing Edgar Allan Poe’s cryptographic tale “The Gold Bug.” Regardless of where Doyle drew his inspiration from, the glyphs of dancing men is a genius idea, and Doyle deserves commendation for it. On a different note, this modern reader wonders how long it took Doyle to write this story, considering that he had to craft a unique dancing man for each letter in his code, then transcribe that letter into a form that The Strand Magazine could publish. Though we may never know the answer to that question, we may feel certain that The Dancing Men was not the Holmes story that Doyle wrote most quickly.
The Dancing Men, at its heart, is a tragedy, and one that is to my mind most similar to The Five Orange Pips. Both stories concern characters with unspeakable American pasts, both stories contain references to abstract messages left upon sun dials, and both end in ignominy for Holmes. In both cases, Pips and Dancing Men, Holmes probably would have been better served to have been more forthcoming with his clients. In the case of The Dancing Men, one wonders whether he might have advised his client, Mr. Hilton Cubitt, to heed his wife’s pleas (she wished to travel out of Norfolk and thus avoid exposure to danger). In such a scenario, Holmes and Watson could have remained at Cubitt’s Norfolk estate, laid a trap for the villain Abe Slaney, and so saved their client’s life.
As it stands, Holmes deciphers the cryptogram and catches the villain, but the victory is Pyrrhic; Mr. Hilton Cubitt is slain by Abe Slaney, and Cubitt’s wife shoots herself in the head in an attempt at suicide. The final paragraph, which reads like an epilogue, states that Abe Slaney was originally condemned to death, but that his sentence was changed to prison time thanks to the “mitigating” certainty that Cubitt fired first. Perhaps I’m overly bloodthirsty, but I think Slaney should have gotten the noose for instigating the affair with Cubitt’s wife, for widowing the blameless woman, and for suffusing the remainder of her life with overtones of sorrow. Justice is not the way of the world, however, as we know from real life and from such fictitious, whirling events as in The Adventure of the Dancing Men.
