The Dancing Men

Title story plus three others featuring the peerless sleuth and his faithful sidekick: "The Adventure of the Dying Detective," "The Musgrave Ritual" and "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans."

Can Holmes decode the message of the dancing men? When Hilton Cubitt finds strange messages around his house, he is puzzled. When his wife sees them, she is terrified! Cubitt turns to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson for answers. Will the duo be able to crack the case before disaster strikes?

This book contains reproductions of the famous Cottingley photographs, and gives the whole of the evidence in connection with them. The diligent reader is in almost as good a position as I am to form a judgment upon the authenticity of the pictures. This narrative is not a special plea for that authenticity, but is simply a collection of facts the inferences from which may be accepted or rejected as the reader may think fit. I would warn the critic, however, not to be led away by the sophistry that because some professional trickster, apt at the game of deception, can produce a somewhat similar effect, therefore the originals were produced in the same way. There are few realities which cannot be imitated, and the ancient argument that because conjurers on their own prepared plates or stages can produce certain results, therefore similar results[vi] obtained by untrained people under natural conditions are also false, is surely discounted by the intelligent public. I would add that this whole subject of the objective existence of a subhuman form of life has nothing to do with the larger and far more vital question of spiritualism. I should be sorry if my arguments in favour of the latter should be in any way weakened by my exposition of this very strange episode, which has really no bearing upon the continued existence of the individual. Arthur Conan Doyle.

Includes an Introduction by Anne Perry and a New Afterword by Regina Barreca. Indisputably the greatest fictional detective of all time, Sherlock Holmes lives on—in films, on television, and of course through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s inimitable craft. These twenty-two stories show Holmes at his brilliant best. THE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECKLED BAND A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLUE CARBUNCLE THE NAVAL TREATY THE FINAL PROBLEM THE ADVENTURE OF THE DANCING MEN THE ADVENTURE OF THE COPPER BEECHES THE CROOKED MAN THE RESIDENT PATIENT THE GREEK INTERPRETER THE ADVENTURE OF THE NORWOOD BUILDER THE ADVENTURE OF THE SOLITARY CYCLIST THE ADVENTURE OF THE EMPTY HOUSE THE FIVE ORANGE PIPS THE BOSCOMBE VALLEY MYSTERY THE ADVENTURE OF THE SIX NAPOLEONS THE ADVENTURE OF THE PRIORY SCHOOL THE MUSGRAVE RITUAL THE MAN WITH THE TWISTED LIP THE ADVENTURE OF THE SECOND STAIN THE ADVENTURE OF THE ABBEY GRANGE

“An astonishingly beautiful book. The best gay novel written by anyone of our generation.”—Harper’s “Through the sweat and haze of longing come piercing insights – about the closeness of gay male friendship, about the vanity and imperfections of men. The more one reads the novel, we realise that what Holleran has given us is our very own queer (queerer?) Great Gatsby: its decadence, its fear, its violence, its ecstasy, its transience.”—The Guardian Andrew Holleran’s landmark novel of a young man's search for love and companionship in New York’s emerging gay world in the 1970s, with a new introduction by Garth Greenwell. Young, astonishingly beautiful, and tired of living a lie, Anthony Malone trades life as a seemingly straight small-town lawyer for the decadence of New York’s emerging gay scene—an odyssey that takes him from Manhattan’s Everard baths and after hour discos, to lavish orgies on Fire Island and parks after dark. Rescuing Malone from a possessive lover and shepherding him through his immersion in this life of fierce joys and cheap truths is the flamboyant Sutherland, a high-camp quintessential queen. But for Malone, the endless city nights and Fire Island days are close to burning out, and despite Sutherland’s abundant attentiveness and glittering world-weary wisdom, Malone soon realizes what he is truly looking for may not be found in these beautiful places, where life is crowded, and people are forever outrunning their own desires and death.

Tony and Olivier Award–winning Bob Avian’s dazzling life story, Dancing Man: A Broadway Choreographer’s Journey, is a memoir in three acts. Act I reveals the origins of one of Broadway’s legendary choreographers who appeared onstage with stars like Barbra Streisand and Mary Martin all before he was thirty. Act II includes teaching Katharine Hepburn how to sing and dance in Coco and working with Stephen Sondheim and Michael Bennett while helping to choreograph the original productions of Company and Follies. During this time, Avian won a Tony Award as the cochoreographer of A Chorus Line and produced the spectacular Tony Award–winning Dreamgirls. For a triumphant third act, Avian choreographed Julie Andrews’s return to the New York stage, devised all of the musical staging for Miss Saigon and Sunset Boulevard, and directed A Chorus Line on Broadway. He worked with the biggest names on Broadway, including Andrew Lloyd Webber, Carol Burnett, Jennifer Holliday, Patti LuPone, Elaine Stritch, and Glenn Close. Candid, witty, sometimes shocking, and always entertaining, here at last is the ultimate up-close and personal insider’s view from a front row seat at the creation of the biggest, brightest, and best Broadway musicals of the past fifty years.

Mr. Hilton Cubbit married a young American girl, named Elsie, a few years ago. Elsie had warned her husband of her dark past and she begged him not dig deeper and ask questions. He managed to keep his promise till the day they received several drawings of little dancing men. Cubbit thought that they were simply some joke, but when he showed them to Elsie, she almost lost her mind. Mr. Hilton could not contact the police, so his only option was to reach out to Holmes. Will Holmes decipher the message in time to save the married couple? What did the dancing men mean? Find the answers in "The Dancing Men" which is a part of "The Return of Sherlock Holmes". Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was born in Scotland and studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. After his studies, he worked as a ship’s surgeon on various boats. During the Second Boer War, he was an army doctor in South Africa. When he came back to the United Kingdom, he opened his own practice and started writing crime books. He is best known for his thrilling stories about the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. He published four novels and more than 50 short-stories starring the detective and Dr Watson, and they play an important role in the history of crime fiction. Other than the Sherlock Holmes series, Doyle wrote around thirty more books, in genres such as science-fiction, fantasy, historical novels, but also poetry, plays, and non-fiction.