“The Adventure of the Speckled Band” by Arthur Conan Doyle
Number 19 of 27 Great British Short Stories
Premise: In April 1883, Sherlock and Watson save a woman from Evil.
Review: Ah, brilliant stuff. I read this forty years ago. I should read all the short stories. Why did I not do this 40 plus years ago. Too much bloody Doctor Who.
This is a great-for-thinking-with piece of work about colonialism, racism (the stuff on gypsies) “more-than-human” ecologies (bramble covered land and the baboon and cheetah) )etc etc. I should see what analyses exist on this.
Outa ten: 10
Keywords: Detective, hysteria, animals, post-coloniality
Quotes:
“Alas” replied our visitor. “The very horror of my situation lies in the fact that my fears are so vague, and my suspicions depend so entirely upon small points, which might seem trivial to another, that even he to whom of all others I have a right to look for help and advice looks upon all that I tell him about it as the fancies of a nervous woman.”
“The ejaculation had been drawn from my companion by the fact that our door had been suddenly dashed open, and that a huge man had framed himself in the aperture. His costume was a peculiar mixture of the professional and of the agricultural, having a black top-hat, a long frock-coat, and a pair of high gaiters, with a hunting-crop swinging in his hand. So tall was he that his hat actually brushed the cross bar of the doorway, and his breadth seemed to span it across from side to side. A large face, seared with a thousand wrinkles, burned yellow with the sun, and marked with every evil passion, was turned from one to the other of us, while his deep-set, bile-shot eyes, and his high, thin, fleshless nose, gave him somewhat the resemblance to a fierce old bird of prey.” p.249
“You speak of danger. You have evidently seen more in these rooms than was visible to me.”
“No, but I fancy that I may have deduced a little more. I imagine that you saw all that I did.”
There was little difficulty in entering the grounds, 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 vise 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.”
At the moment when Holmes struck the light I heard a low, clear whistle, but the sudden glare flashing into my weary eyes made it impossible for me to tell what it was at which my friend lashed so savagely. I could, however, see that his face was deadly pale and filled with horror and loathing. He had ceased to strike and was gazing up at the ventilator when suddenly there broke from the silence of the night the most horrible cry to which I have ever listened. It swelled up louder and louder, a hoarse yell of pain and fear and anger all mingled in the one dreadful shriek. They say that away down in the village, and even in the distant parsonage, that cry raised the sleepers from their beds. It struck cold to our hearts, and I stood gazing at Holmes, and he at me, until the last echoes of it had died away into the silence from which it rose.
Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another
“I had,” said he, “come to 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,’ which was used by the poor girl, no doubt to explain the appearance which she had caught a hurried glimpse of by the light of her match, were sufficient to put me upon an entirely wrong scent. I can only claim the merit that I instantly reconsidered my position when, however, it became clear to me that whatever danger threatened an occupant of the room could not come either from the window or the door.
Words: none
Look up: Eley’s Number 2
Afterlives of the story/connections to other stuff:
Edgar Allen Poe and the Murders in the Rue Morge– ape as perp vs the snake here.
The lions in Wilt by Tom Sharpe
Michael Green Further Undiscovered letters
Ali, Z. 2020. The Colonized Writes Back: Satyajit Ray Decolonizes Arthur Conan Doyle’s Detective Fiction. Here
Frank, L. 1996. “Dreaming the Medusa: Imperialism, Primitivism, and Sexuality in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four,” Signs 22, no. 1
Hendershot, C. (1996). The Animal Without: Masculinity and Imperialism in The Island of Doctor Moreau and “The Adventure Speckled Band”. Nineteenth Century Studies, 10(1), 1-32
Hodgson, J. 1992. The Recoil of “The Speckled Band”: Detective Story and Detective Discourse. Poetics Today, Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 309-324
Huang, B. B. F. (2015). Transported into the Bosom of the Empire?—Rethinking How Arthur Conan Doyle Persuades His Readers of British Imperialism in “The Speckled Band”. Journalism, 5(4), 194-205.
Jaëck, N. (2024). Who Gets to be a Suspect in the Sherlock Holmes Canon? Suspicion as a Conservative Socio-political Structure or as Narrative Brio. Leaves, (17)
Jain, R. and Sharma, A. 2022. Redefining the Sherlock Holmes Canon as an Imperial Construct. International Journal of Multidisciplinary and Current Educational Research, Volume 5,1Pages 117-121|
Kissoon, R. 2021. Mary Watson’s Vanishing Acts: From The Sign of Four to Sherlock. Victorians Institute Journal, Volume 48 doi: 10.5325/victinstj.48.2021.0001
Mathur, S. (2006). Holmes’s Indian reincarnation: A study in postcolonial transposition. Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective, 87-108.
Is it online? Yes
marchudson.net 
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