Strike Up the Band

I have read that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle felt that "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" was the best of all his Sherlock Holmes stories. I have many more stories to go before I can judge whether I agree, but I would concur that so far, this story is indeed in the lead.

Holmes is approached by a young woman living with her stepfather. Her twin sister died two years earlier under mysterious circumstances; a strange whistling roused her in the dead of night for several consecutive evenings, culminating in her emergence from her locked bedchamber to gasp about seeing a "speckled band" before collapsing dead on the floor. Now that the woman herself has recently relocated into the same bedroom, she has heard the same strange whistling, and fears for her life.

Doyle does many clever things with this particular tale. He seizes upon a reason why it could not have been related to the reader at the time, instead presenting it as a flashback to the earlier days with Watson and Holmes still lived together at Baker Street. We hardly got to see the two of them together before Doyle married Watson off and moved him out, so any narrative cheat to revisit these earlier days is welcome. (That said, I am already tiring of the way that Doyle begins every tale by Watson writing something to the effect of: "of all the adventures I ever had with Sherlock Holmes, this one was the most extraordinary." They can't all be that, my dear Watson.)

The other great inspiration in this tale is that it's a "locked room mystery," one of the most fascinating forms of the mystery genre. I also found it enjoyable because more so than any of the Holmes mysteries so far, I feel this one "played fair" with the facts. Enough clues are dropped along the way, recounted faithfully by Watson, that at least the general resolution of the mystery, if not the specifics, should be expected by the reader.

That said, the tale could have perhaps been a bit more intricate. There isn't much in the way of red herrings in this mystery, and no real list of suspects. It sort of works here, because the "whodunnit" isn't as important here as the "how it was done." Still, I think I would have enjoyed a bit more uncertainty about the identity of the culprit.

But as I said, this is probably my favorite Holmes tale so far. I give it a B+.