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IN CONTEXT

TYPE

Short story

FIRST PUBLICATION

UK: December 1903

US: December 1903

COLLECTION

The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1905

CHARACTERS

Hilton Cubitt Squire of Riding Thorpe Manor, Norfolk.

Elsie Cubitt Hilton’s wife, née Elsie Patrick.

Inspector Martin Policeman from the Norfolk Constabulary.

Abe Slaney Chicago gangster.

Wilson Hargreave Member of the New York Police Bureau.

Conan Doyle had the idea for, and partly wrote, “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” while staying at the Hill House Hotel in Happisburgh, near the town of North Walsham, on the Norfolk coast. He wrote to Herbert Greenhough Smith, editor of The Strand Magazine, on May 14, 1903, saying it was “a strong bloody story.” Indeed he placed it third in his 12 favorite Holmes stories because of “the originality of the plot.”

“The Dancing Men” explores two of Conan Doyle’s favorite themes: a respectable person’s secret and disreputable past finally catching up with them; and American organized crime. Both feature in the first-ever Holmes adventure, A Study in Scarlet, as well as “The Five Orange Pips” and “The Red Circle”.

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Powers of reasoning

Holmes’s astounding ability at logical reasoning comes to the fore in “The Dancing Men.” He demonstrates it even before the story is underway. One evening at 221B Baker Street, in the summer of 1898, Holmes is brewing up a “particularly malodorous product” in an experiment when he suddenly announces, “So, Watson… you do not propose to invest in South African securities?” Watson is astonished at his deductions, but Holmes puts his test tube to one side and lists what he calls the missing links of a “very simple chain.” Constructing this “series of inferences” has been but a warm-up for the detective, and he now turns his attentions to another, much more complex case.

"Every problem becomes very childish when once it is explained to you. Here is an unexplained one."

Sherlock Holmes

Mystery in Norfolk

The real puzzle begins as Holmes hands Watson a page torn from a notebook that features a series of 15 hieroglyphic-like doodles of matchstick men in various poses—the “dancing men” of the story’s title. Watson reacts immediately: “Why, Holmes, it is a child’s drawing,” he says. But Holmes is already sure that there is more to this message than first appears.

The sender of the doodles is Mr. Hilton Cubitt, a simple country squire of Riding Thorpe Manor near North Walsham in east Norfolk. He arrives at 221B to tell his story to Holmes. “He was a fine creature, this man of the old English soil,” says Watson, “simple, straight, and gentle, with his great, earnest blue eyes and broad, comely face. His love for his wife and his trust in her shone in his features.”

Cubitt explains that a year earlier, while visiting London for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations (which took place in 1897), he met and fell in love with a lonely young American lady, Elsie Patrick, who was staying in the same boarding house as him. Elsie had candidly told him that she “had some very disagreeable associations” in her life, but would not go into any detail. Cubitt is extremely proud of his old family’s reputation in Norfolk and its “unsullied honour,” and Elsie, deeply respecting that reputation, gave him the chance to break off the engagement. But Cubitt was not put off, telling Holmes, “If you saw her and knew her it would help you to understand.” Cubitt promised never to ask her about her past, and within a month they were married; for the following year they lived in wedded bliss at his Norfolk home.

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North Walsham (pictured) is an old market town north of Norwich. The fictional Riding Thorpe is thought to be a combination of Ridlington and Edingthorpe villages in Norfolk.

Everything changed

One day Elsie received a letter from America, at the mere sight of which she turned “deadly white.” After reading it, she threw it on the fire, so Cubitt has no idea what was in it, but from that moment she has gone about in obvious dread of someone or something. She has not said what that person or thing might be, and Cubitt, keeping his word, has not asked. “She would do better to trust me,” he tells Holmes. “She would find that I was her best friend.” Like many of Holmes’s provincial clients who have not traveled beyond their comfortable borders, Cubitt is stolid and naïve, and is incapable of even imagining the sort of peril she might be in.

Then one night a number of “dancing” figures were scrawled in chalk on a downstairs window-sill of their house. Cubitt had the drawings washed off, but, when he mentioned them to Elsie, he was surprised at how seriously she took the matter. She begged him to show her any more similar drawings, should they appear. Sure enough, a week later on the sundial in the garden he found the piece of paper he had since sent to Holmes—and when he showed it to Elsie, “she dropped in a dead faint.” Since then, Cubitt says, “she has looked like a woman in a dream, half dazed, and with terror always lurking in her eyes.”

Neither Cubitt nor Watson can see it, but to Holmes the carefully defined matchstick men, some in the same poses, others bearing flags, are clearly a code—though he needs more samples if he is to crack it. He tells Cubitt to go home to Norfolk, and to keep him informed of any fresh developments.

"Our presence is most urgently needed… for it is a singular and a dangerous web in which our simple Norfolk squire is entangled."

Sherlock Holmes

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This is the final message that Elsie receives from the mysterious cryptographer. Each “dancing man” represents a different letter, and Holmes begins by using frequency analysis, but he needs all of the messages before he can decipher the entire code.

Holmes the masterful

Two weeks later, a tired and worried Cubitt returns to Baker Street with three more coded messages that have been left outside his property, messages that he says are killing his wife “by inches.” On the night the third message was left, he had stayed up and seen a “dark, creeping figure” in the garden, but just as he was about to rush out with his revolver, Elsie had held him back, clinging to him desperately. For whatever reason, she did not want him to go outside. Evidently she knew who was out there, and that it was someone or something she did not want her husband to be involved in.

Holmes remains professional and calm until Cubitt leaves his lodgings, when he cannot contain his excitement any longer and throws himself into deciphering the messages. For two hours the great detective scribbles away, oblivious to Watson’s presence. Finally, he springs from his chair with a cry of triumph—he has cracked the code. He sends a telegram to an unknown person, and tells Watson they must wait for a reply before doing anything else. Meanwhile, Holmes receives a new coded message from Cubitt. On reading it, and then receiving the reply to his telegram, Holmes “suddenly sprang to his feet with an exclamation of surprise and dismay.” He wants to rush at once to Norfolk, but the last train has left, and they must wait until morning.

19TH-CENTURY CIPHERS

Holmes’s method of deciphering the cryptogram was inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Gold Bug” (1843). Graphic-based secret languages were popular among gypsies, secret societies, and gangs in the late 19th century, especially in the US. By the mid-19th century, more impregnable ciphers had been developed, including “flattening” frequency analysis (by shifting letters or numbers to complicate the code), or secret “keys” that were needed by both the sender and the recipient. The invention of the telegraph and Morse code opened the way to reducing coded messages to numerals or a series of binary symbols (commonly 0 and 1), creating a more complex code. The “Playfair Cipher,” invented in 1854, encrypted pairs of letters or numbers rather than single characters, making the code much more difficult to crack using frequency analysis, and unbreakable unless the recipient knew the “key.” This cipher was used extensively by the military well into the 20th century.

Death in the study

When Holmes and Watson finally arrive at North Walsham the next morning, they are met off the train by the stationmaster with the grim news that Mrs. Cubitt has apparently shot her husband dead, then turned the gun on herself, leaving her seriously wounded. Holmes’s worst fears have been realized.

At Riding Thorpe Manor, with Inspector Martin of the local constabulary for an audience, the great detective conducts a thorough examination of the scene of the crime, and characteristically applies his forensic and reasoning skills to try to make sense of the tragic shootings. Initially the local police inspector is eager “to assert his own position,” says Watson, but he is soon, “overcome with admiration and ready to follow without question wherever Holmes led.”

Cubitt and his wife were found in the study. The maid and the cook, sleeping upstairs, heard “an explosion,” then a second bang a minute later. Rushing downstairs, they found the passage and the study full of smoke, the window of the room shut from the inside, and a candle still burning on the table. They summoned the local doctor.

Cubitt’s pistol is still in the room, “two barrels of which had been emptied”—and Holmes points dramatically to a third bullet hole in the window sash. “By George!” cries the inspector. “How ever did you see that?” Holmes replies: “Because I looked for it.” He has deduced from the smoke in the passage “that the window had been open at the time of the tragedy,” and that a third person must have been involved—Cubitt had shot at whoever was outside the window, hitting the sash. This unknown person had fired the shot that killed Cubitt almost simultaneously, so that the two shots sounded like one “explosion” to the cook and the maid. Elsie had then shut the window before shooting herself. Outside the window, the flowers are trampled and the soft soil is full of footprints. Holmes hunts around “like a retriever after a wounded bird.” Then, with a similar cry of triumph to the one he made when he cracked the code, he finds a third cartridge ejected by another revolver. All the inspector can do is look on in “intense amazement at the rapid and masterful progress of Holmes’s investigation.”

The deciphered code has already given Holmes the third party’s name and address. Pretending to be Elsie, he uses the dancing men code to construct a note intended for one Abe Slaney. Holmes asks Cubitt’s stable boy to deliver the note to nearby Elrige’s Farm. Only then does he confide in Watson and the inspector.

"This sudden realization of his worst fears left him in a blank melancholy."

Dr. Watson

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The Secret Weapon (1943) is credited as being an adaptation of “The Dancing Men.” In fact, it is based on a number of Holmes stories, and the only element taken from this tale is the cryptic code.

Breaking the code

Holmes explains how he deciphered the messages, once he realized it was a simple substitution cipher: each “dance” pose represented a letter of the alphabet . The first message—“am here Abe Slaney”—revealed that a man by that name was in the area; the second—“at Elrige’s”—gave his location at this nearby farm; and the third—“come Elsie”—summoned her to him. However, after Elsie responded “never,” using the same code, the fourth and final message told her to “prepare to meet thy God.”

After deciphering the third message, Holmes had sent a telegram to his friend, Wilson Hargreave, in the New York Police, asking if an Abe Slaney was known to them; the reply that he received, that Abe Slaney was “the most dangerous crook in Chicago,” left Holmes anxious and ready to catch a train to Norfolk.

All is explained

Soon enough, Abe Slaney, “a tall, handsome, swarthy fellow, clad in a suit of grey flannel, with a Panama hat, a bristling black beard, and a great, aggressive hooked nose” is striding up the path to Riding Thorpe Manor, flourishing a cane. The moment he enters the house, Holmes has a pistol to his head and Martin puts him in handcuffs. Slaney readily admits to killing Cubitt, but says it was in self-defense, because Cubitt fired first. He is genuinely grief-stricken to hear that Elsie is seriously injured, and explains that he had only threatened her out of anger, for he loved her and always had. They had grown up together in Chicago, and were members of a gang, of which Elsie’s father was the leader. They had invented the code, deliberately making it look “like a child’s scrawl” so that no one outside the gang would even realize it was a code, never mind be able to decipher it. Elsie “couldn’t stand the business,” and ran away to start a new life. Slaney wrote to Elsie after her marriage to Cubitt, but when she did not reply, he came to England to find her: “Who was this Englishman that he should come between us? I tell you that I had the first right to her, and that I was only claiming my own,” he cries.

The story ends with Slaney being condemned to death at the Norwich assizes, but his sentence is changed to penal servitude “in consideration of mitigating circumstances, and the certainty that Hilton Cubitt had fired the first shot.” Elsie recovers, and devotes her life “to the care of the poor and to the administration of her husband’s estate.”

"I am fairly familiar with all forms of secret writings, and am myself the author of a trifling monograph upon the subject, in which I analyze one hundred and sixty separate ciphers."

Sherlock Holmes

A tale of passion

Conan Doyle draws a striking contrast between the characters of Cubitt and Slaney. Cubitt is an old-fashioned figure representing the traditional British values of honor, loyalty, and decency, while the American Slaney is a brash gangster from the other side of the Atlantic, with his own firm, if somewhat warped, ideas about love and honor.

This is a tale of heated and hidden passions, where Holmes’s rational logic leads the story, but he fails his client. In “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” Conan Doyle seems poised between the naturalism and social realism of 19th-century writers like Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Émile Zola, and Thomas Hardy on the one hand, and the sensationalism of his 20th-century successors such as Agatha Christie and Edgar Wallace on the other. Holmes, perhaps like Conan Doyle himself, is less interested in Slaney’s thwarted passion, the intriguing nature of the triangular relationship, and the eventual, fateful, criminal outcome, than the logical problem of the cryptic code, and how to solve it.

ABE SLANEY

One of several American criminals to feature in Conan Doyle’s work, Abe Slaney is a driven man who is obsessed with Elsie. “I tell you, there was never a man in this world loved a woman more than I loved her,” he tells Holmes. The depth of his love is never in doubt, and when he is told that Elsie has been injured he declares, “I may have threatened her—God forgive me!—but I would not have touched a hair of her pretty head... If Elsie dies, I care nothing what becomes of me.” When Holmes tells him Elsie is suspected of Cubitt’s murder, he readily owns up to killing him himself.

What may have started as passionate love has become a sense of entitlement, as Elsie was pledged to him long ago. How much say Elsie had in that is never revealed. They were engaged before she left the US, and Slaney is convinced she would have married him had he gone straight. Unable to accept her decision to leave him and start a new life without him, his passion becomes a dangerous and tragic obsession.

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