Holmes goes to stay with a university friend during the holidays, and becomes involved in a mystery surrounding the murky past of his friend’s father. This story makes it into this list of the best Sherlock Holmes stories partly because it sees the great sleuth recounting his very first case, while still a student at university. What do they mean, and who is responsible for them?
#Novel sherlock holmes code series#
Hilton Cubitt of Ridling Thorpe Manor in Norfolk, and husband to a nervous wife, tells Holmes a series of stick figures have started to appear chalked up on the window-sill of the house. Doyle himself considered it the third best Sherlock Holmes story of the lot. Its code-themed story probably inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Gold-Bug’, ‘The Dancing Men’ is one of Holmes’s greatest code-breaking triumphs.
The mystery itself revolves around a Greek interpreter named Mr Melas, who is engaged in a rather cloak-and-dagger way to translate for someone who is being held captive by some sinister criminals. It’s in this story that we meet Sherlock Holmes’s brother Mycroft, so that’s partly why we’ve included it here – Doyle himself placed it number 17 th on his list of the greatest Sherlock Holmes cases. If there were another man with such singular powers in England, how was it that neither police nor public had heard of him? I put the question, with a hint that it was my companion’s modesty which made him acknowledge his brother as his superior. The story concerns a missing racehorse and sees Holmes donning his famous deerstalker to investigate. Perhaps best-known for Holmes’s famous line about ‘the curious incident of the dog in the night-time’ (used by Mark Haddon as the title for his bestselling novel), ‘Silver Blaze’ is the first story in the second collection of classic Sherlock Holmes stories, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1893). “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes. “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?” Like many of the Sherlock Holmes stories, the British empire lurks in the background (Dr Roylott had met the girls’ mother out in India, and has a menagerie of exotic animals from that country), and in this connection, the story also reveals a debt to one of the first detective novels, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. The case will require Holmes not only to save his client’s life but to solve the mystery of how her sister died two years ago. The story is a classic ‘locked room’ mystery in which a woman fears for her life.
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