A signed, handwritten manuscript of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” was sold April 18 at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, Texas for $312,500 to an anonymous collector.
The 53-page manuscript was written by Conan Doyle in the late spring of 1903 at Undershaw, his country home in Waverly, Surrey. Only one of two Sherlock Holmes stories in which the great detective’s clients die (the other is “The Five Orange Pips”), it was published simultaneously in the December, 1903 issue of The Strand Magazine in London and the Dec. 5, 1903 issue of Collier’s Weekly in New York. In 1905, it was included as the fourth story in the 13-story anthology The Return of Sherlock Holmes.
Conan Doyle had long pondered writing a story centered on ciphers. In May 1903 while staying at The Hill House Hotel in Norfolk, he signed a young woman’s autograph book. The autograph book also contained drawings made by two children, Gilbert John Cubitt and Edith Alice Cubitt: decorated letters by Gilbert to make a secret writing and stick figure musical notes by Edith on a five-line musical stave. Conan Doyle combined these ideas in the story and in an effort to honor Gilbert and Alice, he named his client Cubitt.
“The Dancing Men” manuscript was written on the recto of wide-ruled paper and includes stick figures sketched by the author. It also contains many hand-written emendations by Conan Doyle and three autographed signatures: on the cover page, on the title page and in a holographic epilogue.
The handwritten manuscript left Conan Doyle’s possession in 1918 when he donated it to an auction to raise funds for the British Red Cross. It was purchased and resold several times before winding up in 1974 in the possession of Brian Perkins, a Texas book dealer. Heirs of Perkins placed the manuscript up for this week’s auction.
The images of the title page and page with dancing figures are courtesy of Heritage Auctions. d
Stan Trybulski, who wrote One Trick Pony and other crime novels, was a Brooklyn felony trial prosecutor before he went into private practice. He says that he now divides his time between France and “two acres of Connecticut tranquility.”