Ouch! A 1905 review of The Return of Sherlock Holmes

In looking through newspapers I came across this 1905 review of "The Return of Sherlock Holmes". It's a fairly tough review for the time. The review does not have an attribution, either of author, or of source (many Australian newspaper items were abstracted from UK or US newspapers, but usually attributed as such).

The reviewer makes several good points. The influence of Edgar Allen Poe and Gaboriau's mystery stories is well made.

I think my favourite point is that ""The Adventure of the Dancing Men" is a barefaced plagiarism". This reviewer is undoubtedly referencing the Poe story "The Gold-Bug" (which can be read here https://poestories.com/read/goldbug ) that relies on a cipher, and involves a similar approach of decoding it.

The reviewer does seem to take a jaundiced view of the stories:

The Queenslander, Saturday 27 May 1905, page 22

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.

"The Return of Sherlock Holmes," by A. Conan Doyle (Longmans, Green, and Co., London, through George Robertson and Co., Brisbane) .— It goes without saying that readers of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle'a books will welcome back to activity that remarkable creation Sherlock Holmes. Of course, Conan Doyle's detective stories were not new things in that form of literature .when they first caught on with the reading world, nor was even the "ingenious ratiocination" of his great central figure original. We must always remember the work of Gaboriau, of Edgar Allan Poe, and others, when we are inclined to allow ourselves to marvel at the clever ratiocination of Sherlock Holmes.

There is not sharper reasoning in any of the Sherlock Holmes series than in "The Murders of the Rue Morgue" or "The Mystery of Marie Roget," though Conan Doyle's adaptations are remarkably smart and readable. In "The Return of Sherlock Holmes" there are some good stories, but the development of them is not always clever. Sherlock Holmes says smart things and does daring things, but there is sometimes a miserable lack of ingenuity in the main ideas. We have no occasion to go farther than "The Adventures of the Norwood Builder" to get an illustration of what we mean. The hiding away of the old rascal who wished to revenge himself upon a woman by causing her son to be suspected of murder was a clumsy invention. And the main theme in "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" is a barefaced plagiarism. The dancing men were figures used to represent letters of the alphabet in threatening communications, and Mr. Sherlock Holmes deciphered the meaning by the very elementary method df finding the figure which appeared most frequently, and applying it to the letter e (the most frequently used letter in our language), and working the system. Now this plan was followed by Edgar Allan Foe, but with much greater cleverness than Conan Doyle has shown. 

Of course, in putting these matters pretty plainly before a generally unsuspecting public, we have no wish to detract from the gripping readableness of the continued Sherlock Holmes stories. They have certain novel features, and will be much enjoyed—but they are not creations.