Discussion Topic
Key Clues in "The Adventure of the Speckled Band"
Summary:
In "The Adventure of the Speckled Band," Sherlock Holmes identifies crucial clues to solve the mystery of Julia Stoner's death: a ventilator connecting her room to Dr. Roylott's, a dummy bell-rope, and a bed clamped to the floor. These suggest the use of a snake as a murder weapon. Additional clues include a steel safe, a saucer of milk, and a looped dog lash in Roylott's room, revealing his method of controlling the snake, which ultimately leads to his own demise.
What are six clues in "The Adventure of the Speckled Band"?
When Sherlock Holmes is inspecting the bedrooms at Stoke Moran, he finds many clues. In Helen Stoner's room he finds a ventilator that only leads into Dr. Roylott's room next door rather than to the outside, as such a ventilator should. Holmes also discovers that the bell-rope beside Helen's bed is a dummy and that the bed is firmly secured to the floor with bolted clamps. These are three important clues. The ventilator was installed on purpose to enable Roylott to send his deadly snake into the sleeping girl's room. The bell-rope was installed to give the snake a way to slip directly down onto the girl's bed. And the bed was clamped to the floor so that it could not be moved away from its position by the bell-rope and directly below the ventilator.
In Dr. Roylott's room Holmes finds a locked steel safe with a saucer of milk...
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on top of it. In addition, a third clue catches his eye:
The object which had caught his eye was a small dog lash hung on one corner of the bed. The lash, however, was curled upon itself and tied so as to make a loop of whipcord.
The snake is being kept in the steel safe. The milk is used to train the snake to come back through the ventilator when Roylott blows his whistle. The looped dog lash is used to recapture the dangerous snake when it emerges through the ventilator. At the climax of the story, when Holmes whips the snake with his cane, it retreats more quickly than Roylott expected. He is killed by the snake, and Holmes and Watson discover his dead body when they enter his room.
What are the three most important clues in "The Adventure of the Speckled Band"?
"The Adventure of the Speckled Band" is an example of a so-called "locked-room murder mystery." The biggest question is: "How could Julia Stoner have been murdered in her bedroom with her door locked and the window tightly shuttered?" The prototype for this story was probably Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," in which the question was how two women could have been murdered in a room in which their door and windows were tightly shut. The door or one of the windows might have been open when the murderer entered, but how could he exit and leave door and windows locked from the inside?
Holmes is trying save his client Helen Stoner from being murdered, but this automatically involves trying to find out how her sister was murdered two years earlier in the same room with the door locked and shutters bolted. The three most important clues have to be found inside that room. They are the ventilator between Helen's and her stepfather's rooms, the dummy bell-rope, and the fact that the bed is held in one place by being clamped to the floor. After the mystery has been solved and Dr. Roylott is dead, Holmes explains to Watson what he deduced from these three clues.
"My attention was speedily drawn, as I have already remarked to you, to this ventilator, and to the bell-rope which hung down to the bed. The discovery that this was a dummy, and that the bed was clamped to the floor, instantly gave rise to the suspicion that the rope was there as a bridge for something passing through the hole and coming to the bed. The idea of a snake instantly occurred to me, and when I coupled it with my knowledge that the doctor was furnished with a supply of creatures from India, I felt that I was probably on the right track."
Note that this is the first time the word "snake" is used in the story. The author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, knew that the word could give away his whole plot if he used it earlier. The reader would guess that a snake could get into the locked room even if it were impenetrable by a human murderer. That is why the term "speckled band" is used in the text and even in the title up to the point where the trick has been exposed. Holmes' deductions are put to the proof when he and Watson spend the night in Helen's room and the snake is plainly seen by both men at around three o'clock in the morning.
It would seem that Julia Stoner must have seen the snake after she had been bitten two years ago. The reason she doesn't call it a snake but a "speckled band" is that she is dying from the fast-acting venom and is nearly in a coma already. When Helen is describing that night to Holmes at Baker Street early that morning, she tells him her sister's last words:
"'Oh, my God! Helen! It was the band! The speckled band!’ There was something else which she would fain have said, and she stabbed with her finger into the air in the direction of the doctor's room, but a fresh convulsion seized her and choked her words."
Julia was trying to tell Helen that she had been bitten by a snake and to indicate that their stepfather was responsible. But Helen still doesn't understand this at the time of her early-morning interview with Holmes. When he asks her what she thinks her sister meant, she tells him:
“Sometimes I have thought that it was merely the wild talk of delirium, sometimes that it may have referred to some band of people, perhaps to these very gipsies in the plantation. I do not know whether the spotted handkerchiefs which so many of them wear over their heads might have suggested the strange adjective which she used.”
The author is obviously trying to preserve his mystery until the climax, when Holmes lights a candle and whips the snake with his cane, driving it back up the dummy bell-rope and through the ventilator, where it bites Dr. Roylott and kills him.