How Arthur Conan Doyle Plotted Against Sherlock Holmes

How Arthur Conan Doyle Plotted Against Sherlock Holmes

Larry Holzwarth - October 15, 2020

How Arthur Conan Doyle Plotted Against Sherlock Holmes
Doyle at first enjoyed his resurrected detective, though he tired of him again. Wikimedia

11. Doyle regained enthusiasm for his characters

In December, 1903, The Strand Magazine published a short story under the title The Dancing Men. It was later changed to The Adventure of the Dancing Men, and Doyle eventually wrote that it was his third favorite of all the Holmes stories (his overall favorite was The Adventure of the Speckled Band). His fondness for the story indicated his reticence over resurrecting the character had passed. It included Holmes deciphering an encrypted message, drawn in stick figures of men. Doyle enjoyed ciphers and codebreaking as a hobby, and closely followed emerging methods. One of these, frequency analysis, allows figures to be assigned corresponding letters.

Holmes used the method to crack the code, and then sent a message to a suspect in the same code. The Adventure of the Dancing Men became one of the most popular of all the Holmes stories, and numerous films, television adaptations, and radio plays are based on its premise. The story appeared in the United States in Collier’s, though the Sidney Paget illustrations did not. Nor had Paget’s work appeared in the American version of The Adventure of the Empty House. Collier’s presented illustrations by Frederic Dorr Steele, who illustrated most of the Holmes stories in America.

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