The Adventure of the Speckled Band

"The Adventure of the Speckled Band"
1892 illustration by Sidney Paget
Author	Arthur Conan Doyle
Series	The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Publication date	1892

"The Adventure of the Speckled Band" is one of the 56 short Sherlock Holmes stories written by Scottish author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is the eighth of the twelve stories collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It is one of four Sherlock Holmes stories that can be classified as a locked room mystery. The story was first published in Strand Magazine in February 1892, with illustrations by Sidney Paget. It was published under the different title "The Spotted Band" in New York World in August 1905. Doyle later revealed that he thought this was his best Holmes story.

Doyle wrote and produced a play based on the story. It premiered at the Adelphi Theatre, London on 4 June 1910, with H. A. Saintsbury as Sherlock Holmes and Lyn Harding as Dr. Grimesby Roylott. The play, originally called The Stonor Case, differs from the story in several details, such as the names of some of the characters.

Plot summary

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

Sir Grimesby Roylott does keep strange company at the estate. He's best friends with a band of Gypsies on the property and keeps as pets a cheetah and a baboon. For some time, he has been making modifications to the house: Before Helen’s sister’s death, he had modifications made inside the house, and now he is 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 Roylott, who threatens him should he interfere. Undaunted, Holmes proceeds, first to the courthouse, where he examines Helen’s 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 room and that of Roylott.

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 reveals to Watson that Roylott plotted to remove both daughters before they married because he would have lost most of the fortune he controlled when the daughters took with them the money left them by their mother.

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.

Reception

Swamp adder

Naja naja, the Indian cobra

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 (Naja naja) 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. However, snakes are deaf, and therefore it would not be possible 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.

Heloderma suspectum, the Mexican Gila monster

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

File:TheSpeckledBand.jpg

First play publication

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 June 4, 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

• The short story was also adapted for the now-lost 1912 British-French short film Le ruban moucheté / The Speckled Band, featuring Georges Tréville, a 1923 film starring Eille Norwood as Holmes and a 1931 film starring Raymond Massey as the detective. The 1944 film The Spider Woman is based on several Holmes stories, among them "The Speckled Band."

Radio adaptations

• A half-hour radio adaptation starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce was broadcast as an episode of the series The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes on November 12, 1945, sponsored by Petri Wines.

• A half-hour radio adaptation starring Tom Conway and Nigel Bruce was broadcast as an episode of the series Sherlock Holmes on June 23, 1947.

• A half-hour radio adaptation starring John Stanley and Ian Martin was broadcast as an episode of the series Sherlock Holmes on December 19, 1948.

• A one-hour radio adaptation was broadcast as an episode of the series CBS Radio Mystery Theater on June 28, 1977.

• A BBC Radio 4 dramatisation starring Clive Merrison and Michael Williams was broadcast as an episode of the series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes on August 29, 2008.

TV adaptations

• A half-hour television adaptation starring Alan Napier and Melville Cooper was broadcast as the tenth episode of the NBC Television series Your Show Time on March 25, 1949.

• The pilot episode of the BBC's 1964–1965 series Sherlock Holmes was a new version of "The Speckled Band", airing in May 1964. The episode was written by Giles Cooper, was directed by Robin Midgley, and starred Douglas Wilmer as Holmes and Nigel Stock as Watson.

• "The Speckled Band" was adapted for the screen in the USSR in 1979 with Vasily Livanov as Sherlock Holmes and Vitaly Solomin as Doctor Watson.

• "The Speckled Band" was the sixth episode of the first series of Holmes adaptations starring Jeremy Brett, first broadcast in 1984.

• "The Speckled Band" was adapted as part of the 1984–85 anime series Sherlock Hound. In this version, Moriarty poses as Roylott to steal Helen's money, and Hound gets involved when his motorcar breaks down and must stay at their home for the night.

• Kōki Mitani adapted "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" and "The Creeping Man" to an episode in the NHK puppetry series Sherlock Holmes. One night swamp adder with crocus-shaped speckles is found in Beeton School. On the next day, trainee teacher Helen Stoner visits Holmes and Watson in 221B of Baker Dormitory and tells them about the strange behaviour of Grimesby Roylott who teaches chemistry. That night they find out what his behaviour means but Sherman, a female pupil is attacked by the adder.

Later stage adaptations

• In autumn 2013, a new stage adaptation, Sherlock Holmes and the Speckled Band, by Max Gee premiered at Treasurer's House, York and Ripley Castle, Ripley, North Yorks. The play was produced by Theatre Mill, directed by Samuel Wood, and starred Liam Tims as Holmes and Adam Elms as Watson.

See also

• The Speckled Band (1923 film)
• The Speckled Band (1931 film)
• Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (USSR film) – The Adventure of the Speckled Band + A Study in Scarlet

External links

• The full text of The Adventure of the Speckled Band at Wikisource
• Media related to at Wikimedia Commons
• "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" at Google Books
• The Adventure of the Speckled Band public domain audiobook at LibriVox
• The Adventure of the Speckled Band complete film on YouTube (Classics movie online)