I wonder how much stock we should put in the famous list Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made of his favourite Sherlock Holmes stories. The reason I wonder is that he ranked “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” third on that list and I doubt I’d put it in the top 10. Meanwhile, “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” didn’t make the cut (the original list was of 12 titles) and I liked it a lot more. But Doyle did give his reasons (he ranked “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” so highly “on account . . . of the originality of the plot”) and I guess there’s no arguing over taste. It’s just that I don’t think an author’s opinion, even of their own work, is necessarily worth any more than the average reader’s. Though readers seemed to really like “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” too.
To me the original plot just seems like the usual hook of the lover returning for revenge that Doyle had been going back to since A Study in Scarlet. Here it’s garnished with a childishly simple cipher device of the kind that I remember solving when they used to run in newspapers. It’s hard to imagine Holmes even being that interested in it, and his dawdling leads to the death of the man who had sought his help, which only happens in one other story in the canon (“The Five Orange Pips”). The man’s wife, however, may recover from her attempted suicide as “the bullet had passed through the front of her brain.” Lucky her! I didn’t know that was considered just a flesh wound in Victorian days.
The point in the story that interested me the most though has to do with Doyle’s narrative economy. I pointed this out earlier in my notes on “A Scandal in Bohemia” and another example of the same device used there occurs in this story. As Holmes is investigating the room with the corpse of the man in it this is what he says to the local inspector:
“It is now necessary that we should try to throw some light upon this third bullet, which has clearly, from the splintering of the wood, been fired from inside the room. I should like to see Mrs. King, the cook, again. You said, Mrs. King, that you were awaked by a loud explosion . . .”
The elision is so fast you don’t even notice. In the same bit of dialogue, without any indication of time passing, Holmes goes from saying he would like to see the cook again to addressing her directly. As I’ve said before, I don’t know how many other authors were experimenting this boldly with the collapsing of time. I’m not sure how many have even done it since. Doyle was precociously modern in this regard.
Alex Good 