STATISTICAL DECODING OF CIPHER MOTIFS IN CLASSICAL DETECTIVE PROSE

Abstract

This article studies how quantitative procedures guide the decoding of cryptic signs in classical detective prose. The material is drawn from Edgar Allan Poe’s «The Gold Bug» and Arthur Conan Doyle’s «The Adventure of the Dancing Men». The analysis shows that counting, recurrence tracking and positional comparison do not merely support interpretation. They organize it, reduce uncertainty and convert an obscure sign sequence into a controlled route toward semantic recovery.