The Dancing Men

Hilton Cubitt is a straightforward Derbyshire squire, and he brings Holmes a problem that makes no sense at all. Someone keeps leaving him drawings of little dancing men, stick figures that ought to be a child's game. His American wife Elsie is terrified of them, and she will not say why. On their wedding day she made him promise never to ask about her past, and he has kept that promise. He cannot ask now.

Holmes takes the drawings the way he takes everything, as material to be studied. And what the code spells out is worse than a practical joke. A dreadful murder is sitting behind those little figures, and the trail runs from Inspector Martin to a man called Abe Slaney. The stick figures become the running visual device of the episode, and the dread builds around something small enough to fit in a pocket.

Tenniel Evans plays Cubitt as a decent man out of his depth, and Betsy Brantley's Elsie carries the weight of a past she cannot discuss. John Bruce directs, with the script credited to Arthur Conan Doyle, John Hawkesworth and Anthony Skene. Lorraine Peters, David Ross, Eugene Lipinski, Wendy Jane Walker, Paul Jaynes and Bernard Atha fill out the supporting cast. Michael Cox produced, with music by Patrick Gowers and cinematography by Ray Goode.

The episode does something quietly clever. It takes the flimsiest object imaginable, a matchstick drawing, and makes it the engine of the whole story. Holmes cracks the cipher from his armchair as much as from the crime scene, which is a pleasure in itself. The solution is planted in plain sight all along, in the very messages nobody wanted to look at. And the ending is grim in the way Conan Doyle could be grim, with no softening of the outcome. That feels right.