What is the title of the Sherlock Holmes story featuring the coded dancing figures?

The Sherlock Holmes story featuring coded dancing figures is “The Adventure of the Dancing Men.”

The story was written by Arthur Conan Doyle and first published in 1903. It centers on a series of messages made from simple drawings of stick-like figures in different poses. Holmes recognizes that the pictures form a substitution cipher, in which each dancing figure represents a letter.

The messages frighten Hilton Cubitt, who finds them connected with his wife Elsie’s troubled past. Holmes works to decode the symbols before the threatening communication leads to further violence. The cipher gives the story a distinctive visual puzzle and makes it one of the best-known Holmes cases involving cryptography.

Illustrations are important to the original presentation because readers can inspect the changing figures as Holmes does. The story is sometimes confused with “The Speckled Band,” another famous Holmes title, but that case concerns a deadly exotic animal and a family mystery rather than coded messages.