I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: hiatus.

[READ: March 24, 2024] “The Speckled Band”

The eighth story in this collection is a bit longer than the others and offers some good complications.

I enjoyed that Watson sets this story up by saying that it’s an older story but he has been prevented from writing about it because the woman it involved was still alive.  Now that she has recently passed, it was fair game.

A woman comes to Holmes fearing for her life.  She literally woke up in a cold sweat and flew as fast as she could to Baker St.

Helen Stoner has been living with her stepfather for many years.  He married Helen and her twin sister’s mother when the girls were two and living in India.  They moved back to England, but rather than him starting his medical practice as he proclaimed, he returned to his family’s old mansion and set about doing his own thing.

Rather than being a beloved old resident, he has become a monster–fighting with people, causing the police to come out to the house at all hours.  He has also become quite peculiar:

He had no friends at all save the wandering gipsies, and he would give these vagabonds leave to encamp upon the few acres of bramble-covered land which represent the family estate, and would accept in return the hospitality of their tents, wandering away with them sometimes for weeks on end. He has a passion also for Indian animals, which are sent over to him by a correspondent, and he has at this moment a cheetah and a baboon, which wander freely over his grounds and are feared by the villagers almost as much as their master.

He has a cheetah and a baboon roaming the grounds.

The girls had a pretty miserable life.  When her sister was engaged, their step father didn’t protest, but soon after, she was found dead in her room.  And now that Helen herself has gotten engaged, her stepfather began work on her bedroom and she has had to move into her dead sister’s room.

There are obviously suspicious things about this room, the most obvious of which is a low whistle that rings out during the night (and which her sister said she her on the night before she died).  Her sister’s last words were “the speckled band.”  Could it refer to he speckled bandanas that the gipsies wear?

As the woman leaves, a giant of a man (Helen’s stepfather) bursts in on them and tells them to butt out.

Holmes discovers that if the girls married, they would receive a sizable portion of the fortune upon which the stepfather is dependent.  A motive at last.

But what exactly had happened and what would happen to Helen?  Homes devises a clever ploy to solve this locked-door mystery.  I enjoy a story where even Holmes says he was initially mistaken–completely thrown of the trail by misunderstanding information that he was given.

This is also the second really terrible stepfather that we have encountered in these stories.

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The four novels of the canon:

1. A Study in Scarlet (1887)
2. The Sign of the Four (1890)
3. The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
4. The Valley of Fear (1915)

The 56 short stories are collected in five books:

1. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892)
2. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894)
3. The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905)
4. His Last Bow (1917)
5. The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927)

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892) contains 12 stories published in The Strand between July 1891 and June 1892

1. “A Scandal in Bohemia” (June 1891)
2. “The Red-Headed League” (August 1891)
3. “A Case of Identity” (September 1891)
4. “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” (October 1891)
5. “The Five Orange Pips” (November 1891)
6. “The Man with the Twisted Lip” (December 1891)
7. “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” (January 1892)
8. “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (February 1892)
9. “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb” (March 1892)
10. “The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor” (April 1892)
11. “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” (May 1892)
12. “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches” (June 1892)