The Speckled Band

"The Adventure of the Speckled Band"
1892 illustration by Sidney Paget
Author	Arthur Conan Doyle
Language	English
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.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson rise unusually early one morning to meet a young woman named Helen Stoner. Helen fears that her life is being threatened by her stepfather, Dr. Grimesby Roylott, a doctor who practiced in India and was married to Helen’s late mother who was a widow living in India. Dr. Roylott is the impoverished last survivor of what was a wealthy but violent, ill-tempered and amoral Anglo-Saxon 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 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.