1. Plot summary

2. Inspirations

3. Reception
    Swamp adder 

4. Adaptations
    Theatre  Film adaptations   Radio adaptations  TV adaptations  Video game adaptations 

5. Notes

6. External links

"The Adventure of the Speckled Band" is one of the 56 short Sherlock Holmes stories written by 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.^[1]

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.^[1]

Plot summary

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson rise unusually early one morning to meet a young woman named Helen Stoner who fears that her life is being threatened by her step-father, Dr. Grimesby Roylott, a doctor who practiced in Calcutta, India and was married to Helen's late mother who was a widow living there. 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, troubled by the perplexing death of her sister^[2], 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.

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 identifies the snake as a swamp adder and reveals to Watson the motive: the late wife's will had provided an annual income of ₤750 sterling, 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.^[1] 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

The name swamp adder is an invented one,^[1] and the scientific treatises of Doyle's time do not mention any kind of adder of India.^[6] 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.^[3] 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.^[1] 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.

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.

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.^[3] 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 is 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.^[3] 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.^[3]

Adaptations

Theatre

• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle authored an adaptation for the stage in 1910, The Speckled Band.^[4]
• 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.^[5]

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.^[6]
• The 1923 silent short film starring Eille Norwood as Holmes^[7]
• The 1931 film, The Speckled Band, starring Raymond Massey as the detective was an adaptation of Conan Doyle's stage play.^[8]
• The 1944 film The Spider Woman is based on several Holmes stories, among them "The Speckled Band."^[9]

Radio adaptations

• The premiere episode of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes featured an adaptation of the story on October 20, 1930 and starred William Gillette as Holmes and Leigh Lovell as Watson.^[10]
• 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 12 November 1945, sponsored by Petri Wines.^[11]
• A half-hour radio adaptation starring Tom Conway and Nigel Bruce was broadcast as an episode of the series Sherlock Holmes on 23 June 1947.^[12]
• A half-hour radio adaptation starring John Stanley and Ian Martin was broadcast as an episode of the series Sherlock Holmes on 19 December 1948.^[13]
• A one-hour radio adaptation was broadcast as an episode of the series CBS Radio Mystery Theater on 28 June 1977.^[14]
• A BBC Radio 4 dramatisation starring Clive Merrison and Michael Williams was broadcast as part of Bert Coules' complete radio adaptation of the canon on 9 January 1991. It also featured Susan Wooldridge as Helen Stoner.^[15]
• A one-hour adaptation by an Indian radio channel Radio Mirchi, Kolkata starring Mir Afsar Ali in Bengali language and was broadcast as an episode of series Sunday Suspense on 1 May 2016.

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 25 March 1949.^[16]
• The pilot episode of the BBC's 1964–1965 series Sherlock Holmes was a new version of "The Speckled Band", airing in May 1964 as part of the Detective anthology series. The episode was written by Giles Cooper, was directed by Robin Midgley, and starred Douglas Wilmer as Holmes, Nigel Stock as Watson and Felix Felton as Roylott.^[17]
• "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.^[18]
• "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 a 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.^[19]

Video game adaptations

• Naruhodō Ryūnosuke no Bōken adapted "The Speckled Band" into the game's second episode, "The Adventure of the Unbreakable Speckled Band". In the episode, the protagonist aids Sherlock Holmes in the investigation, the protagonist's best friend takes the place of Helen Stone as the victim, and the culprit's true identity is changed to a Russian asylum seeker who was going by the alias of Roylott to hide their identity. The actual truth behind the case is completely altered, with Holmes at one point deducing the story's original conclusion before another character points out the numerous flaws in it.

Notes

External links

• {{wikisource-inline|The Adventure of the Speckled Band|single=true}}
• {{Commonscat-inline}}
• [https://books.google.com/books?id=buc0AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA176&dq=the+specled+band&as_brr=1&ei=tNCkS8-NM6biygTU9-zICA&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false "The Adventure of the Speckled Band"] at Google Books
• {{librivox book | title=The Adventure of the Speckled Band | author=Sir Arthur Conan Doyle}}

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