‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ is one of Sherlock Holmes’s best-known early cases.1 The affair is recalled by Watson, much later in life. The lady who initially implored the great detective’s assistance has, we guess, recently died (prematurely, it would seem), allowing Watson to divulge her story to the world. As Watson recalls, in April 1883 Miss Helen Stoner, a handsome but clearly distressed young woman with prematurely white strands in her hair, called at 221B Baker Street, early in the morning. Her tale was intriguing. Raised in India, she had returned to England some ten years earlier with her mother, her twin sister Julia, and her stepfather. The girls’ mother has died eight years since, ‘in a railway accident near Crewe’. Helen’s stepfather; who evidently married his wife for her money (some £1,100 a year, shrunk by current agricultural distress to £750), is an unredeemable brute, the degenerate offspring of a ‘dissolute and wasteful’ family on whose decayed estate, Stoke Moran in Surrey, they now live in reduced circumstances. A doctor by profession, Roylott is suspected of having murdered a servant in India and – as Holmes astutely deduces – routinely brutalizes his stepdaughters (the detective’s sharp eyes note bruises on Miss Stoner’s wrist and arm). The Misses Stoner, on marriage, will take to their husbands a portion of their mother’s inheritance. Julia, however, has died very recently in suspicious circumstances after indicating an intention to marry.

Helen describes the enigmatic events surrounding her sister’s death in some detail. On the evening she died, the young ladies, as had happened before, heard a ‘low whistle’, for which they had no explanation. There was also heard a clanging sound, which was similarly mysterious to them. The girls have separate bedrooms and, after retiring, Helen was roused by a hideous shriek. She rushed out to encounter Julia emerging from her room, ‘swaying like a drunkard’. The unfortunate woman convulsed and died seconds later, in agony. There were no marks apparent on her body, nor any evident cause of death. Julia’s final words are baffling in the extreme:

as I bent over her she suddenly shrieked out in a voice which I shall never forget, ‘Oh, my God! Helen! It was the band! The speckled band!’ There was something else which she would fain have said, and she stabbed with her finger into the air in the direction of the Doctor’s [i.e. her stepfather’s] room, but a fresh convulsion seized her and choked her words.

The doctor, it emerges, has lately been intimate with a band of gipsies on his ‘plantation’. These are the only human beings with whom he has any civilized intercourse. Possibly, conjectures Miss Stoner, the mysterious speckled band may refer ‘to the spotted handkerchiefs which so many of them [i.e. gipsies] wear over their heads’. But since no one has been seen entering or leaving the room, what we would seem to have here is a version of the ‘locked room mystery’ – that master-class problem for all great sleuths.

These, Holmes opines, ‘are very deep waters’. Helen goes on to say that she too is about to be married, to ‘Percy Armitage – the second son of Mr Armitage, of Crane Water, near Reading’. Her stepfather has offered no objection to the match, but she has anxieties. More so, since she has been moved by his instruction into the very bedroom that her unlucky sister formerly occupied, and has the previous night heard the same ominous whistle that they heard on the night of Julia’s death. After Miss Stoner has left, Holmes and Watson receive an unpleasant call from Dr Grimesby Roylott, of Stoke Moran. He confirms his stepdaughter’s unflattering account. An old man possessed of almost superhuman strength (he bends a poker double to add emphasis to his threats), his face is ‘marked with every evil passion’. He utters some inarticulate but very horrible imprecations against Holmes, should he interfere.

Holmes later admits that at this initial stage he had formed ‘an entirely erroneous conclusion, which shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data’. The presence of the gypsies, and ‘the use of the word “band”’ had thrown the sleuth on an ‘entirely wrong scent’. We never discover what Holmes’s erroneous ‘conclusion’ was – presumably that Roylott summoned gipsy assassins to his daughter’s chamber for light-footed murder.

After the visits of Miss Stoner and Dr Roylott, Holmes and Watson take the train down to Stoke Moran. They discover in the dead girl’s bedroom a dummy bell-pull. The bed is bolted to the floor, so that it must always be directly underneath the tasselled cloth band, which is odd. Holmes’s sharp eyes also detect an air-vent which has been recently constructed. Its passage does not connect, as would be logical, to an outside wall, but to the doctor’s adjoining bedroom. This vent allows the rank odour of Roylott’s cigar and even gleams of light to penetrate into Helen’s chamber. It is not said outright, but we deduce that the vent could also serve as a spy-hole for anyone with voyeuristic intentions. Dr Roylott, of course, is no gentleman and a young lady’s privacy would not be sacred to him.

In every way Stoke Moran gives Holmes and Watson the impression of being an ‘evil household’. The outlying estate is similarly infested with signs of evil. ‘There was little difficulty in entering the grounds,’ Watson recalls:

for unrepaired breaches gaped in the old park wall. Making our way among the trees, we reached the lawn, crossed it, and were about to enter through the window, when out from a clump of laurel bushes there darted what seemed to be a hideous and distorted child, who threw itself upon the grass with writhing limbs, and then ran swiftly across the lawn into the darkness.

‘My God!’ I whispered; ‘did you see it?’

Holmes was for the moment as startled as I. His hand closed like a vice upon my wrist in his agitation. Then he broke into a low laugh, and put his lips to my ear.

‘It is a nice household,’ he murmured. ‘That is the baboon.’

Baboons, of course, are not native to Surrey. This beast is a relic from a menagerie of Indian animals which the doctor tried unsuccessfully to set up on his return from the subcontinent. But, for astute readers of detective stories, the introduction of the baboon will recall that archetype of the locked-room mystery genre, Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), where the murderer is finally revealed to be an orangutan. Might the baboon have somehow been responsible for Julia’s death?

The denouement is quickly told. In a metal safe (with a sonorously clanging door) in his bedroom Doctor Roylott keeps a trained swamp adder – the ‘deadliest snake in India’. This beast has been trained to respond to whistled signals. It is capable of slithering through the connecting vent and down the fabric bell-rope. (It defies plausibility, incidentally, that it could slither back up – some variant of the Indian rope trick was apparently in Doyle’s mind.)2 This serpent is the ‘speckled band’ of which the inarticulate and dying Julia spoke. Surprised by Holmes and Watson as it slithers towards its second victim, the infuriated snake insinuates its way up the bell-pull and back into Roylott’s bedroom and stings him to death. Holmes has, quite advertently as he later confesses, engineered the doctor’s death. ‘I cannot say that it is likely to weigh very heavily on my conscience’, he complacently informs Watson.

There remain, even after the thrilling denouement, profound mysteries to this case. The deceased Miss Stoner was, like her twin sister Helen, brought up in India where she spent what we can calculate to be her first fifteen years or so of life. This experience would certainly have educated her as to the existence of snakes. Why, then, after having been agonizingly stung and clearly having seen what stung her, does she waste her last words talking about ‘speckled bands’ as if she had never seen such a thing as a swamp adder, or its serpentine cousins? Even if an old India hand might have had a momentary confusion on waking from sleep, it would quickly have been dispelled by the sinuous movements of the ‘band’, and its bite. That bite, incidentally, is anything but painless. The Doctor emits a ‘dreadful shriek’ on being bitten which is audible in the nearby village. One might also carpingly note that, although a swamp adder might be trained to return to its nest on command, it could scarcely be trained to bite on command.

When one looks more closely at it, the whole question of what it is Julia sees is vexed. According to Helen, when she ran out, alarmed by Julia’s ‘wild scream’, into the passage connecting their bedrooms: ‘By the light of the corridor lamp I saw my sister appear at the opening, her face blanched with terror, her hands groping for help, her whole figure swaying to and fro like that of a drunkard’. As Helen puts her arms around the dying woman, ‘she suddenly shrieked out in a voice which I shall never forget, “O, my God! Helen! It was the band! The speckled band!”’ At this point, she falls speechless, although as Helen notes, ‘there was something else she would fain have said, and she stabbed with her finger into the air in the direction of the Doctor’s room’.

While writing the scene Conan Doyle evidently realized that, in order for the victim to have seen the ‘speckled band’, there must be some source of light in Julia’s room. If there were too much light she would naturally see the reptile slithering up and down the bell-pull, and make too correct an identification. Thus, in reply to Holmes’s question, ‘Was your sister dressed?’, Helen is made to reply, ‘No she was in her nightdress. In her right hand was found the charred stump of a match, and in her left a matchbox’. The feeble light afforded by a Victorian Lucifer would explain how a snake might look like a ribbon. But how, one may ask, when she emerged into the corridor did Julia’s hands ‘grope for help’, or her finger point towards the doctor’s room?3

Why, as a further mystery, did Julia not complain at the doctor’s knocking a hole into the adjoining wall between their bedrooms, violating her privacy and adding nothing to the freshness of her boudoir? Why do the girls not leave Stoke Moran? There is no reason for Julia to have remained there: she was of age, and her prospective in-laws would certainly have given her a haven (as, of course, would the Armitages of Reading for Helen, were she to ask them). There is, one deduces, a strong suggestion of sexual bondage. The girls, for some reason, cannot leave. We never learn how Helen came by the bruises on her wrists that Holmes discerns at their first interview in Baker Street. All that she says, by way of blushing explanation, is that ‘He is a hard man … and perhaps he hardly knows his own strength’. This, notoriously, is what battered wives tell the police and magistrates in defence of their brutal husbands. ‘Miss Roylott’, says Holmes, ‘You are screening your stepfather’. Why, in saying this, does Holmes, who has the best brain in England, miscall Miss Stoner ‘Miss Roylott’ – is he hinting at a closer relationship than that of stepfather and stepdaughter? Has the unspeakable Dr Roylott somehow mixed his identity with that of the young woman? Helen Stoner, we note, does not correct Holmes when he calls her ‘Miss Roylott’ – is he not subtly probing for evidence of incest, and has he not found it?4

This whole episode recalls a vivid exchange between Holmes and Watson in another exciting early case, ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches’. As they travel into rural Hampshire Watson enthuses about the beauty of the scene. ‘Good heavens!’, he exclaims, ‘Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?’ Holmes replies bleakly that such idyllic landscape fills him with more ‘horror’ that ‘the lowest and vilest alleys in London’:

the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard’s blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.

Reading ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ at a deeper level than the sleuth’s slick cracking of the case, there remains a surplus of unresolved questions. Why did Helen, after being released from Stoke Moran, die so prematurely? Was it some ineradicable legacy of shame? Why does Holmes feel justified in killing Dr Roylott as justifiably as one might squash a dung beetle? He is not normally given to such acts of vigilantism. What ‘hidden wickedness’ may we surmise was going on at Stoke Moran under the doctor’s corrupt regime? Much more, we apprehend, than the amiably dull-witted Watson suspects.

Notes

1. The story was first published in the Strand, February 1892 and republished in the collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – which proved a runaway bestseller. It is recorded as being the author’s own favourite among his works.

2. See The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, ed. W.S. Baring-Gould, 2 vols. (New York, 1967), i. 263–6. In a sceptical appendix on ‘the deadliest snake in India’ the editor concludes that there is no such reptile as an ‘Indian swamp adder’, and no known snake could kill a human victim in ten seconds, as does Roylott’s reptilian assassin. The most satisfactory explanation is that the thing in question is half Gila monster and half Indian cobra. It would be impossible for a snake to clamber up a bell-rope as is claimed in the story, ‘for snakes do not climb as many think – by twining themselves around an object; they climb by wedging their bodies into any crannies and interstices, taking advantage of every irregularity or protrusion upon which a loop of the body may be hooked’ (i. 265).

3. The point is made in The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, i. 249.

4. The Roylott misnaming, which is found in the original Strand publication of ‘The Speckled Band’, has unfortunately been corrected in the Oxford World’s Classics edition. There is a possibility that the ‘error’ (if that is what it is) arose from the fact that in the original manuscript of the story, ‘Helen Stoner is Helen Roylott, and Dr Roylott is her father’ (The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, i. 246). I would prefer to see it as a subtlety deliberately introduced by the author. A facsimile of the original February 1892 Strand text of ‘The Speckled Band’ may be found in the Wordsworth Classics edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (London, 1992), 213–29. The ‘Miss Roylott’ comment is on 219.