The Adventure of the Speckled Band

Plot summary

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson rise unusually early one morning to meet a young woman named Helen Stoner. Helen fears that her life is being threatened by her stepfather, Dr. Grimesby Roylott, a doctor who practiced in India and was married to Helen’s late mother three years earlier. Dr. Roylott is the impoverished last survivor of what was a wealthy but violent, ill-tempered and amoral Anglo-Saxon aristocratic family of Surrey, and has already served a jail sentence in the past for killing his Indian butler in a rage. Helen’s twin sister had died almost two years earlier, shortly before she was to be married. Helen had heard her sister’s dying words, "The speckled band!" but was unable to decode their meaning. Helen herself is now engaged, and she has begun to hear strange noises and observe strange activities around Stoke Moran, the impoverished and heavily mortgaged estate where she and her stepfather live.

Dr. Roylott also keeps strange company at the estate: He is best friends with a band of Gypsies on the property, and has a cheetah and a baboon as pets. For some time, he has been making modifications to the home. Before Helen’s sister’s death, he had modifications made inside the house, and is now having the outside wall repaired, forcing Helen to move into the room where her sister died.

Holmes listens carefully to Helen’s story and agrees to take the case. He plans a visit to the manor later in the day. Before he can leave, however, he is visited by Dr. Roylott himself, who threatens him should he interfere. Undaunted, Holmes proceeds, first to the courthouse, where he examines Helen’s late mother’s will, and then to the countryside.

At Stoke Moran, Holmes inspects the premises carefully inside and out. Among the strange features that he discovers are a bed anchored to the floor, a bell cord that does not work, and a ventilator hole between Helen’s temporary room and that of Dr Roylott's.

Holmes and Watson arrange to spend the night in Helen’s room. In darkness they wait; suddenly, a slight metallic noise and a dim light through the ventilator prompt Holmes to action. Quickly lighting a candle, he discovers on the bell cord the "speckled band"—a venomous snake. He strikes the snake with a stick, driving it back through the ventilator. Agitated, it attacks Roylott, who had been waiting for it to return after killing Helen. Holmes then reveals to Watson the motive: the late wife's will had provided an annual income of 750 GBP, of which each daughter could claim one third upon marriage. Thus, Dr. Roylott plotted to remove both of his stepdaughters before they married to avoid losing most of the fortune he controlled when the daughters took with them their share of money left for them by their mother from their birth father's estate.

Inspirations

Richard Lancelyn Green, the editor of the 2000 Oxford paperback edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, surmises that Doyle's source for the story appears to have been the article named "Called on by a Boa Constrictor. A West African Adventure" in Cassell's Saturday Journal, published in February 1891. In the article, a captain tells how he was dispatched to a remote camp in West Africa to stay in a tumbledown cabin that belonged to a Portuguese trader. On the first night in the cabin, he is awoken by a creaking sound, and sees "a dark queer-looking thing hanging down through the ventilator above it". It turns out to be the largest Boa constrictor he has seen (more likely a python because there are no boas in Africa). He is paralysed with fear as the serpent comes down into the room. Unable to cry out for help, the captain spots an old bell that hung from a projecting beam above one of the windows. The bell cord had rotted away, but by means of a stick he manages to ring it and raise the alarm.

Swamp adder

The name swamp adder is an invented one, and the scientific treatises of Doyle's time do not mention any kind of adder of India. To fans of Sherlock Holmes who enjoy treating the stories as altered accounts of real events, the true identity of this snake has been a puzzle since the publication of the story, even to professional herpetologists. Many species of snakes have been proposed for it, and Richard Lancelyn Green concludes the Indian Cobra (Raja nagam) is the snake which it most closely resembles, rather than Boa constrictor, which is not venomous. The Indian cobra has black and white speckled marks, and is one of the most lethal of the Indian venomous snakes with a neurotoxin which will often kill in a few minutes. It is also a good climber and is used by snake charmers in India. Snakes are deaf in the conventional sense but have vestiges to sense vibrations and low-frequency airborne sounds, making it remotely plausible to signal a snake by whistling. Also, while snakes are capable of climbing solid objects, there is no way one could have climbed a cord.

In The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, the deafness inconsistency (while not the others) was solved by Dr. Roylott (suspecting the deafness of snakes) softly knocking on the wall in addition to whistling. While snakes are deaf, they are sensitive to vibration.

Bitis arietans from Africa, Russell's viper and saw-scaled viper also bear resemblance to the swamp adder of the story, but they have hemotoxin — slow working venoms.

The herpetologist Laurence Monroe Klauber proposed, in a tongue-in-cheek article which blames Dr. Watson for getting the name of the snake wrong, a theory that the swamp adder was an artificial hybrid between the Mexican Gila monster (Heloderma suspectum) and Naja naja. His speculation suggests that Doyle might have hidden a double-meaning in Holmes' words. What Holmes said, reported by Watson, was "It is a swamp adder, the deadliest snake in India"; but Klauber suggested what Holmes really said was "It is a samp-aderm, the deadliest skink in India." Samp-aderm can be translated "snake-Gila-monster"; Samp, Hindi for snake, and the suffix aderm is derived from heloderm, the common or vernacular name of the Gila monster generally used by European naturalists. Skinks are lizards of the family Scincidae, many of which are snake-like in form. Such a hybrid reptile will have a venom incomparably strengthened by hybridization, assuring the almost instant demise of the victim. And it will also have ears like any lizard, so it could hear the whistle, and legs and claws allowing it to run up and down the bell cord with a swift ease.

Adaptations

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself wrote a stage play based on "The Speckled Band". In December 1909, Conan Doyle had leased the Adelphi Theatre in the Strand for a production of his elaborate drama The House of Temperley. The play was not a smashing success. When King Edward VII died suddenly the following spring, the West End theatres closed in mourning. Temperley was already losing money weekly; the closing spelled its demise. Conan Doyle had refused an earlier offer to sublet the playhouse to a musical comedy. With a ruinously expensive theatre on his hands, Conan Doyle decided to play "a bold and energetic game." The American actor William Gillette had achieved considerable success portraying the famous detective in the stageplay Sherlock Holmes, which was based on an earlier Conan Doyle script. Conan Doyle was "charmed with the play, the acting, and the pecuniary result," and determined to cash in on its popularity. He wrote his own play in what he later referred to as "record time," and so saved the situation.

"I shut myself up and devoted my whole mind to making a sensational Sherlock Holmes drama. I wrote it in a week and called it The Speckled Band after the short story of that name. I do not think I exaggerate if I say that within a fortnight of the one play shutting down I had a company working upon the rehearsals of a second one, which had been written in the interval. It was a considerable success."

The Speckled Band was Arthur Conan Doyle's third stageplay and was the second Holmes dramatization. It was based with some modifications on the short story of the same name which, according to Adrian Conan Doyle, was his father's favorite Sherlock Holmes tale.

Conan Doyle engaged the estimable H. A. Saintsbury, who had toured with the Gillette company, to portray Sherlock Holmes; Lyn Harding, a talented character actor of leering villains, to play Dr. Rylott (which was spelled "Roylott" in the original short story); Claude King to play Doctor Watson; and a live snake as the title character. On 4 June 1910, less than a month after the other play's closing, the Adelphi's lights again kindled and Sherlock Holmes walked the stage.

Holmes and Watson worked their usual magic on the audiences; but this time they were nearly overshadowed by the burly villain, Dr. Grimesby Rylott, who petted his snake in its wicker basket while the Hindu servant played eerie music on a pipe. Even Conan Doyle's bow was upstaged when Lyn Harding appeared at curtain call with the snake draped around his neck.

"Lyn Harding, as the half-epileptic and wholly formidable Doctor Grimesby Rylott, was most masterful, while Saintsbury as Sherlock Holmes was also very good. Before the end of the run, I had cleared off all that I had lost upon the other play, and I had created a permanent property of some value. It became a stock piece and is even now touring the country."

The Speckled Band ran for 169 performances at the Adelphi Theatre before transferring to the Globe on 28 August. The play enjoyed a successful tour in England, with two touring-companies on the road by the end of August, while the New York presentation was marred by clumsy production.

Conan Doyle's financial difficulties were at an end, yet there were still problems to be resolved with the production. While the human cast was excellent, the live snake proved to be a rather poor performer.

"We had a fine rock boa to play the title-rôle, a snake which was the pride of my heart, so one can imagine my disgust when I saw that one critic ended his disparaging review by the words, 'The crisis of the play was produced by the appearance of a palpably artificial serpent.' I was inclined to offer him a goodly sum if he would undertake to go to bed with it. The real fault of the play was that in trying to give Holmes a worthy antagonist I overdid it and produced a more interesting personality in the villain. The terrible ending was also against it."

However, it was a considerable success and saved a difficult – almost a desperate – situation. Another criticism of the play is that the form of the Sherlock Holmes short stories is missing. Holmes appears late in the narrative, while the ending is missing Holmes' explanations of how he came to his deductions – considered de rigueur among Holmes aficionados.

The production moved to New York. There was a London revival of this play in 1921.

Film adaptations

Radio adaptations

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Later stage adaptations