We’ve all heard the old saying “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” In the essay “Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Dancing Men and Women” by Alastair Fowler it is a case of “you can’t always judge an essay by its title.” Given the fact that the title of the actual story is “The Dancing Men”, we can logically deduce that Fowler’s essay is likely to be feminist in nature. Just because logic leads us to that conclusion does not mean it is the correct conclusion. Very early in the essay, we can see clear evidence that Fowler’s analysis of the story is in fact from a deconstructionist angle. Fowler dissects Conan Doyle’s stories of Sherlock Holmes from more than one vantage point in an attempt to classify exactly what genre it is a part of. While he is correct in pointing out some similarities and parallels to Poe, perhaps more revealing about his views are the differences he points out that make Holmes stories rather unique from the rest of detective fiction. “Detective fiction generally involves two interpretative activities, the detective’s investigation and the reader’s attempts (hampered by narrative subterfuges) at the same problem. But Conan Doyle commonly has at least three investigations, since the narrator, Watson, also takes a hand (not all visible); sometimes with more success than the reader, but always with less than Holmes.” (P. 354) Fowler has broken down and very nicely summarized Conan Doyle’s incredibly helpful use of a supporting character narrator. By unpacking this one step further, we can see that instead of just a main character zipping through a mystery leaving us readers in his or her wake to continually be wondering what is going on, the use of Watson as the narrator acts as a lens. Watson is a sort of middle ground, or mediator, between us and Holmes that allows us to keep up at a slightly accelerated pace while still not