The Adventure of the Dancing Men

"As I said, when I finished reading Christie , I moved on to Sherlock Holmes . I’m quite a completionist; if I discover a new author I have to read all of their books. So, I read all of Sherlock Holmes and this is the one that stood out for me, the one that got me most excited. It starts with pictures of dancing men being delivered, in a note, to a guy who seems completely harmless and lovely. He’s just married an American lady with a bit of a shady past, and the note scares her, even though it seems childish to him. That’s the thing about the story I love. These dancing stickmen are slightly ridiculous, but it ends up so horrible. It’s a very menacing story, with quite a grounded, down-to-earth resolution. It’s short and logical and real, which is not always the case in a Conan Doyle story. So, yes, that’s the one that I took with me – that, and The Speckled Band. They’re the two I thought of while I was compiling this list. They’ve always stuck with me. It brings order, doesn’t it? Somebody dies. Usually – or, not usually, but often – the person is revealed to have had it coming in some way. In a lot of mysteries, they’ve usually done something to bring this upon themselves, in some capacity. Then it becomes a board game, because a lot of these books make their characters such ciphers. You’re not killing a real person, you’re killing a collection of ticks and whims and plot secrets. Christie had a few books when she tried to do more. As she went on, she wrote strange books, where she spends half the book, almost, with the victim before she kills them. I really like that. I want the victim to be a person. I want them to be somebody who you can get to know. But also – it’s hard to explain – I like them to have a hand in the resolution of their own crime. A character who knows something’s going on, and is trying to do something about it, either by investigating, or knowing what’s going on around them and trying to stop it. That’s far more interesting to me than somebody who doesn’t see it coming, then dies."