This was Doyle’s favourite Holmes story, and has been voted in some readers’ polls as his best. And I think I can see some of the reasons why. It’s quite colorful, with gypsies, a baboon, and a cheetah all prowling the grounds of Stoke Moran for no reason essential to the plot at all. And it has one delightful scene where a brutish man tries to intimidate Holmes by bending a poker. That’s enough for twenty or so pages of fun.

Watson even introduces the story by saying that he can’t recall any case he observed Holmes work on “which presented more singular features.” Which is saying something, because he also tells us that Holmes always worked “for the love of his art” more than “for the acquirement of wealth,” so much so that “he refused to associate himself with an investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic.”

But wait. Hadn’t Holmes also observed, on several occasions, that it’s ordinary crimes that are the hardest to solve, while ones that were exceptional in some way were more obvious? In choosing cases tending toward the unusual and the fantastic wouldn’t he just be picking the low-hanging fruit?

I’ll grant that “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” is unusual and fantastic. It has the air of a gothic thriller, albeit mixed with some elements familiar to the canon, like evil coming to England from abroad. The features are indeed singular, and the crime downright weird, though oddly enough it also felt in keeping with some of the elaborate-to-the-point-of-strained-eccentricity plots of Agatha Christie. The reveal of the “speckled band” at the end even reminded me of a similar sort of experience I had with a snake in the basement of my old house, though with less fatal consequences.

“When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge.” I found myself nodding along to this. Holmes references the (then notorious, now forgotten) killers Palmer and Pritchard, who both poisoned their victims. But I thought of more contemporary figures like Harold Shipman (Britain’s most prolific serial killer), Michael Swango (subject of James B. Stewart’s book Blind Eye), and in Canada the cases of Mohammed Samji and Paul Shuen (both recounted in Michael Lista’s true crime collection The Human Scale). I say this not because I dislike doctors, but only to shoot down the notion that somehow doctors are less likely to be homicidal psychopaths because they’re well educated and work in a “caring” profession. Doctors are no better or worse than any of the rest of us. To think otherwise is making a big mistake.

To return to the baboon and cheetah, they are both described by the young lady in the story, the damsel in distress, as “Indian animals” that the lord of the manor wanted to have around because they reminded him of his time stationed there. But baboons are not native to India and it seems unlikely Doyle meant the Asiatic cheetah. That species had not yet vanished from India but was very rare (it was declared locally extinct in 1952, with only a critically endangered population still existing in Iran).

As per usual, I think Doyle was just being casual with the facts, and would get a laugh out of people trying to trip him up. But then I think those fact-checkers are just having fun with the idea that somehow everything in the canon has to make sense anyway. Like nailing down the exact dates when the events in every story took place.

It’s not my favourite Holmes story, or the one I think the best. I’m not sure I’d even call it his most memorable case, as I’d completely forgotten it. But then few mysteries do stay in your head. It’s what allows you to re-read them every five or ten years, as though for the first time.

Holmes index