The worst mistakes of the greatest detective

The locations were shot largely in the north of England, the late Victorian interiors were meticulous period reconstructions, and the whole enterprise had the quality of seeming to have been filmed inside the original Sidney Paget illustrations. It remains the definitive dramatization, and Brett’s performance, all coiled intelligence and occasional savagery, set a standard that subsequent actors have circled without quite reaching.

The point of mentioning all this is that even this perfect fictional detective, rendered in the most careful and faithful version ever committed to videotape, was built on a character who screwed up more often than the legend admits.

When I first read the story of The Dancing Men at the age of eleven, I remember feeling distinctly superior. The little stick figures did not strike me as especially mysterious. They looked like a code, behaved like a code, and were written in chalk on walls and doors in a manner that made it rather obvious that someone wanted them to be noticed. Even then, without formal training as a child codebreaker, I had the impression that one could sit down with a pencil, count the repetitions, and make a decent attempt at solving it over the course of an afternoon.

What never occurred to Hilton Cubitt, a man of property, servants, and sufficient leisure to travel to London on ambiguous business, was that the drawings might be a code at all. This is perhaps the most revealing detail in the entire story. Holmes sees symbols. Cubitt sees childish doodles. The difference between genius and disaster is sometimes no more than a willingness to consider that something odd might actually mean something.

Cubitt himself is a type that appears frequently in the Holmes canon. He lives in a respectable manor house not much short of a stately home,  employs several staff to do his bidding, and has the means to take himself to London when needed, presumably in a first class carriage. These clients tended to show up out of breath at the Baker Street offices of the great detective, not because they are foolish, but because they are accustomed to a world in which problems are handled by paid help. Which is why the dancing men landed up on Holmes’s desk.

Holmes, for his part, is not quite as infallible as legend would have it. The case of the dancing men ends with his client Cubitt dead, which would not be considered a desirable outcome in a modern professional audit. Holmes does indeed crack the code, identify the villain, and set a trap for him with a coded message of his own, but he and Watson arrive on the scene too late to save the life of his client. By his own admission, a day earlier might have made a crucial difference.

The Granada adaptation adds one detail that Arthur Conan Doyle himself left unresolved.

Abe Slaney, the Chicago gangster whose dancing-man cipher sets the whole tragedy in motion, is initially sentenced to death for the murder of Hilton Cubitt, only to have the sentence commuted to penal servitude on the grounds that the householder fired first.

Holmes, characteristically, had deduced that both men fired simultaneously, which makes this legal reasoning somewhat elastic. Whether some subtle pressure from the American embassy had found its way into the appeals process is a question the production never answers, and the relevant archives, if they ever existed, appear to have been lost to posterity. It is the kind of loose end that Doyle himself might have appreciated, since his detective’s world ran most smoothly only when certain inconvenient details were allowed to remain unexamined.

There are smaller cracks as well. At the start of the same story, Holmes deduces that Watson has been playing billiards because there is chalk between his thumb and forefinger. Anyone who has ever held a cue knows that the chalk goes on the tip, not on the hand, unless Watson has developed some highly unorthodox technique. It is a minor point, but it reminds one that even the great detective sometimes bullshits.

Trains run through nearly every story, not as background scenery but as essential infrastructure. Clients arrive by train, villains escape by train, clues are sent by train. The railway is the internet of its day, carrying mail, messages, people, and consequences at a speed that makes the countryside suddenly porous. Without trains, half the plots dissolve into local gossip.

Then there is the matter of Holmes’s judgment. In The Yellow Face, he is not merely late or slightly off. He is entirely wrong. He constructs an elaborate theory of blackmail and scandal, only to discover that the truth is that a woman is protecting her mixed-race child from an earlier marriage. The lesson is sharp enough that he later instructs Watson to whisper the word Norbury in his ear if he ever grows too confident. It is a rare moment in which Holmes is forced to confront not a failure of logic, but a failure of imagination.

One might place Irene Adler, the woman who outwitted Holmes, on a similar scale. She fools Holmes not through superior deduction but through a clear understanding of how he thinks.

Returning now to the mystery of the dancing men, there is something almost touching about Mr. Cubitt’s inability to see what is in front of him. It never occurs to him that the figures might carry meaning, just as it never occurs to Holmes in another case that a woman might be acting out of love rather than fear or guilt. And he doesn’t even think it particularly odd that the lome American woman he met and quickly married in London made him promise to never ask her about her past in America–because if he had, he might have discovered that her father was the biggest gangster in Chicago.

Each man is limited by the assumptions of his world.

As a boy, I thought the code was obvious and the story a simple puzzle. Reading it now, it feels less like a puzzle and more like a study in small oversights. A missed train, a misplaced assumption, a chalk mark in the wrong place, a set of figures dismissed as nonsense. None of these errors is large in its own right,  but together they are enough to bring the whole edifice down.

Holmes remains brilliant, of course. The trains still run, the clients still arrive out of breath from their manor houses still with their country tweeds and walking sticks, and the clues still fall into place with satisfying precision. But every now and then, a man dies, a theory collapses, or a detail rings slightly false, and one is reminded that even the world’s greatest detective has a few blind spots.

It is in those moments that the stories feel closest to the truth.