‘The Speckled Band’ Revisited
In an interview a while back, I was asked which was the first Sherlock Holmes story I ever read. Thrown by the question, I replied The Hound of the Baskervilles, which was certainly one of the first. However, it was only afterwards that I recalled exactly.
My parents were not great readers but they had a bookcase, and, since a bookcase must have books, they purchased some of those volumes in nicely matching covers to put upon it. As a bookish and curious child, I revelled for instance in People of the World in Pictures, deliciously horrified by women who extended their necks by many inches with metal rings which, once on, must never be removed, or tribes who inserted large plates of wood into girls’ lips. Both allegedly signs of beauty.
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More fascinating to me, however, were two massive collections I returned to time after time, Tales of Mystery and Adventure and Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. It was there I first came upon M.R.James and that that flesh-creeper by W.W. Jacobs, The Monkey’s Paw. And it was there, as I now remember, that I read my very first Sherlock Holmes story, The Adventure of the Speckled Band. It made such an impression, I can still call to mind the illustration that accompanied it.
I must have been young, for I was a precocious reader and by the age of thirteen was into Dostoevsky and the like. But inspired by that first acquaintance, I gradually progressed to more and more Holmes, reading and rereading.
The Speckled Band remained a favourite, however. That villainous stepfather, that innocent young woman, that terrifying swamp adder! (Search learned treatises on snakes, my friends, and you will not find swamp adders listed. Holmesian scholars have expended vast energies into identifying the snake Conan Doyle had in mind. But I imagine he himself was not so bothered: he needed a venomous snake that would kill in seconds, and just made one up, something writers do and scholars don’t).
Interestingly enough, the inspiration for the story, according to Richard Lancelyn Green, was possibly an article in Cassell’s Saturday Journal of February 1891 (Doyle’s story appeared a year later). ‘Called on by a Boa Constrictor’ tells how a captain in West Africa was nearly killed by a snake which came through a ventilator above his bed in the night. Again let’s not be too fussy. There are no boa constrictors in Africa. It was probably a python.
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The Adventure of the Speckled Band isn’t just a favourite with me. There are scores of adaptations, from the dramatized version Conan Doyle devised himself in 1910, to films such as that of 1931 starring Raymond Massey as Holmes, through very many radio and TV versions, to animation and even a video game. As usual my favourite of these is the TV episode with Jeremy Brett as Holmes and a thoroughly terrifying Jeremy Kemp as the evil Dr Roylott. I even reference the story myself in my forthcoming novel, Mrs Hudson goes to Ireland, of which more very soon.
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