I’ll be uploading rankings of Sherlock Holmes stories from my new book, Wherever Fact May Lead Me: A Ranking of the Sherlock Holmes Stories, every day till we reach the best story. After that, I’ll share my ranking of the best villains in the Holmes canon. You can find the rankings on my website, and you can buy a copy of the book on Amazon.
Ranking the Sherlock Holmes Stories
8. The Adventure of the Speckled Band (February 1892, Adventures)
It is in The Adventure of the Speckled Band that Holmes shows the greatest amount of physical strength that ever he displays, and Doyle shows us the first of the mysteries in which an animal is in some way responsible for a death. (As I write this, one of my dogs—the littlest, and our only female, Velvet—has come and put her paws upon my leg and rested her head upon my knee as if to put in a good word for the mammals of the animal kingdom, and to say, “Snakes may be bad, but dogs are sweet and good.”) Like in The Five Orange Pips, there is no time to waste and little margin for error, but this time (as opposed to in Pips), Holmes acts decisively. He drives out to Stoke Moran, investigates the scene at once, and formulates a plan. Helen Stoner shall retire early, signal Holmes and Watson when she is in her bedroom, then they shall take her place. Once in the bedroom, they begin an eerie (and, it must seem to Watson, frighteningly interminable) vigil. When Dr. Roylott presumes his victim to be asleep, he looses his snake through the dummy ventilator and down the bell rope that doesn’t pull. Holmes beats the serpent back, and it recoils angrily onto the devilish doctor. What a story!
Not only is the mechanism for murder ingenious, but the atmosphere at Stoke Moran is thrilling. A cheetah and a baboon inhabit the doctor’s grounds! And Holmes and Watson must cross these grounds to reach Helen Stoner’s window. Zounds! However, perhaps in the extraordinary course of Holmes’ adventures, he is more inured to such things than others would be, so he does not find them so outlandish. So, to gauge the weirdness of the situation more accurately I shall put myself into the shoes of someone more conventional—say, those of Dr. Roylott’s neighbor.
I imagine that, as Dr. Roylott’s neighbor, I am living a respectable life in staid and genteel England, where all is expected to be decorous, respectable, and unadventurous. Yet next door to me, this doctor who has returned from India permits a cheetah and a monkey to roam the yard. Dr. Roylott lets his house fall into disrepair. Gypsies inhabit his garden. He’s recently thrown the blacksmith over a rail. I have reason to believe that he abuses his daughter, and I know that his other daughter died under suspicious and cloudy circumstances. If I were Dr. Roylott’s neighbor, I would be thinking of him, “What an abominable pest! What a horrible man! What a black stain on the neighborhood he is!” And, if I were the neighbor, upon hearing of Dr. Roylott’s death, I probably would have nodded my head and thought to myself (even while saying aloud to my neighbors, “Ah, such a tragedy. The inconstancy of life.”), “I wonder how many cartwheels I can do down my living room hall? And, just how indecent would it really be to plan a parade?” The coroner, when summoned to examine the circumstances surrounding Dr. Roylott’s death, must have gone out with a skip in his step, and a twinkle in his eye, and he must have been hard-pressed to stifle the song on his lips. Indeed, it is hard not to imagine the station-master, before Holmes boards the train back to London, stepping out specially to give Holmes a strong, quiet shake of the hand, to meet his Holmes’ eyes, and to give Holmes a manly, solemn, and understanding nod of the head. Certainly Holmes does the community a great favor in The Adventure of the Speckled Band, and, as to the snake, one may only hope that, as a reward for its services, it was returned to the jungle, where it devoured rats by the kilo, or as many as its serpentine heart desired.
