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The Adventure of the Dancing Men
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The Complete Sherlock Holmes - The Adventure of the Dancing Men
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The Adventure of the Dancing Men (The Return of Sherlock Holmes)
Discussion Questions
1) Why do you think Holmes asked Watson about investing in the South African securities that led up to the case of the dancing men?
2) Was it better for Hilton Cubitt to explain from the beginning of the time when he met his wife to Holmes rather than recount the events in the letter that he sent? If he hadn’t, would it have made the case more difficult for Holmes?
3) How and why are the hieroglyphs depicted as dancing men instead of simply childish drawings? How does Holmes decode it?
4) After reading the story, do you believe that Abe Slaney is the one at fault for murdering Hilton Cubitt and leaving his wife a widow? Or was it the wife’s fault for not saying something sooner? How does this affect the moral of the story?
5) Why do you think Holmes withheld his disclosures from Watson before attempting to meet up with Cubitt?
6) What made Holmes believe that Abe Slaney was an American?
7) What made Holmes sure that Slaney would respond to the letter showing up to the house not long after Cubitt was murdered?
Some of Holmes's code-breaking seemed a bit of a stretch (i.e., how he gets the word "never" from a single letter), but I've always been bad at these things so I suspended disbelief.This story is terribly depressing and I really have to question Holmes's seeming deathwish for his clients... why does he never suggest they go and stay in a hotel until it all blows over?
There were similarities between this and the others we've read, namely the idea that the colonies/former colonies are places where Bad Men Roam and the past comes back to haunt you, similar to A Study in Scarlet, The Yellow Face and to some extent The Crooked Man or The Hound of the Baskervilles. The dancing men are a novel addition though.
While more communication would be good between husband and wife, I really hope people aren't going to go with the idea that it's her fault. She clearly told him "never!" Why these men think women are for them when they've actually gone and married someone else is just... depressing.
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I agree; it wasn't her fault. It's sad that this story ended in tragedy for such a great couple. I'd read it before but completely forgot all the details.
Emily wrote: "Some of Holmes's code-breaking seemed a bit of a stretch (i.e., how he gets the word "never" from a single letter), but I've always been bad at these things so I suspended disbelief.This story is..."
I was wondering how this short is translated across different languages, specially the ones that didn't use the latin alphabet. The explanation of the key of the code that is rooted in logic and the fact that there's no symbols for some latin letters that maybe are needed in other languages to compose the secret message make me wonder about it.
A terribly sad story about a woman born into a world of criminality and unable to escape from it. When Holmes first thought of sending that telegraph to the USA he should also have thought of some protection for the Cubitts. His delay in acting was fatal because he could have prevented Elsie from meeting Abe.
Shouldn’t Elsie have come clean before the marriage and said to Hilton, ……..
‘I am the daughter of a Chicago gangster, I hope that doesn’t change things for us?…….. Oh!, and I am in hiding from another gangster who I was engaged to but I broke it off. He could come looking for me. I will understand Hilton, if you don’t want to go through with it.’
The ending seemed a little incredulous to me. Even though it was the late Victorian period I can’t believe that society would embrace Elsie, knowing her background and after the scandal of the murder. Her only practical solution, sad as it may seem, would be to escape once again, this time from the pernicious gossip of the Norfolk gentry.
https://gazetteer.sherlock-holmes.org...
Trev wrote: "A terribly sad story about a woman born into a world of criminality and unable to escape from it. When Holmes first thought of sending that telegraph to the USA he should also have thought of som..."
I didn't necessarily get the sense society embraced her. Doesn't it just say that she lives very quietly and manages her husband's estate? Surely society wouldn't be able to prevent that?
The Adventure of the Dancing Men (The Return of Sherlock Holmes)
Availability The Return of Sherlock Holmes: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/108
Background Information
"The Adventure of the Dancing Men" is a Sherlock Holmes story written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as one of 13 stories in the cycle published as The Return of Sherlock Holmes in 1905. It was first published in The Strand Magazine in the United Kingdom in December 1903, and in Collier's in the United States on December 5, 1903.
Conan Doyle ranked "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" third in his list of his twelve favourite Holmes stories. This is one of only two Sherlock Holmes short stories where Holmes' client dies after seeking his help. Holmes's solution to the riddle of the dancing men rests on reasoning that closely resembles that of Legrand in Poe's "The Gold Bug."
The original title was "The Dancing Men," when it was published as a short story in The Strand Magazine in December 1903.
Publication History
The story was published in the UK in The Strand Magazine in December 1903, and in the US in Collier's on December 5, 1903. It was published with seven illustrations by Sidney Paget in the Strand, and with six illustrations by Frederic Dorr Steele in Collier's. It was included in the short story collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes, which was published in the US in February 1905 and in the UK in March 1905.
A Short Review
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would rank The Adventure of the Dancing Men as one of his favourite short Sherlock Holmes stories.
On the face of it, the drawings of dancing men may seem to be a childish prank, and that is what Watson assumes they are, but the fact that the figures are frightening a grown woman half to death of course means that there is something more sinister to them.
The case is one where the reader can work alongside Holmes, not just in solving the case, but also in deciphering the message, for the Dancing Men figures are reproduced in most reprints of the story.
Despite having a very high success rate with the most difficult of cases, in The Adventure of the Dancing Men, whilst Holmes does eventually solve the case, his client is not alive to witness the success. In this case the client is killed as Holmes is on the verge of deciphering the messages; this is similar to the case of The Five Orange Pips.
The Adventure of the Dancing Men has been adapted for stage and screen on several occasions. The first famous adaptation starred Peter Cushing as Holmes in the 1960s, but a second adaptation was undertaken by Granada TV when Jeremy Brett starred as Sherlock Holmes.
The Dancing Men Alphabet
The Dancing Men alphabet is a cypher created by Arthur Conan Doyle in 1903, and used in his Sherlock Holmes short story The Adventure of the Dancing Men, published in Collier's and The Strand Magazine in December 1903.
The alphabet is a simple character substitution. Each symbol may have two forms: a dancing man and the same dancing man holding a flag to represent the separation of two words.
In his manuscript, Conan Doyle used 18 symbols for the 18 letters needed in his cyphers. 8 letters (F, J, K, Q, U, W, X, Z) were not used and then have no known symbols.
Note that P and V have almost the same dancing man symbol (in the V the foot is slightly sloping to the left).