The Adventure Of The Dancing Men by Arthur Conan Doyle, 1903
The magic trick:
Using a pictograph as part of the text in a story about codebreaking
This is a very odd – and specific – magic trick. But I like it.
Doyle casts Sherlock as a codebreaker in this mystery. The client brings Sherlock several mysterious pictographs to decipher. The cool thing is that they are included in the text, so I suppose any reader could try their hand at cracking the code themselves. And that’s quite a trick on Doyle’s part.
The selection:
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