Sherlock Holmes At His Best: ‘The Speckled Band’

Oct 27

Think Sherlock Holmes and you’re likely to think ‘ratiocination’—the reliance on pure reasoning over emotion. Eccentric and often cold even to his faithful Watson, Holmes is portrayed as something of a thinking machine. He even criticizes Watson for making his stories of their adventures too romantic, insisting they should concentrate 100% on the logic he employs to solve crimes. (Thank goodness Watson doesn’t listen.)

But the term didn’t originate with Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle. Like the idea for a consulting detective itself, it comes from Edgar Allan Poe. Poe used the term ratiocination when describing his 1841 story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."

The fact is, that story is a masterpiece of the macabre and horrific, however brilliant the deductions of Poe’s detective, C. Auguste Dupin. In the hands of a master mystery writer, even an ultra-rational detective can find himself in a tale that’s thrilling and chilling. As with Poe’s “Morgue,” the same is true in Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” from the first Holmes collection, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. “Reason all you want,” we can almost hear Doyle telling his detective. “But when you’re facing a diabolical and heartless villain like the one in ‘Speckled Band,’ you’d better be prepared to show something more than a quick wit. And you’d better have a good stout stick at hand as well.

This story has some delicious Gothic elements: a half-ruined old mansion, an ancient family in decline, twin sisters at peril, and a cruel stepfather who can bend fireplace pokers with his bare hands. But “Speckled Band” takes a leap forward (or actually, one that harkens back to Poe) to offer not only puzzling clues, but a murder scheme devised in the blackest of hearts.

“I have heard, Mr. Holmes, that you can see deeply into the manifold wickedness of the human heart,” says the terrified client who engages the detective’s services. (Compare that language with the opening sentences of Poe’s story “Berenice”: “Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform.”) And as Holmes says to his client as she tells her tale: “These are very deep waters.”

In some of Doyle’s tales of the great detective, the mystery is easy to guess. “The Red-Headed League” comes to mind, for instance. But as a boy and even later as an adult re-reading the tale, I was baffled by the clues offered in “Speckled Band.” Even more important in my mind, I was sucked into the dark and dangerous goings-on in “the old ancestral house at Stoke Moran.” When an author goes beyond thinking machines that solve puzzles to provide stories that offer a tour into the darkest regions of the human mind, that, as Dumbledore says in one of the Harry Potter books, is saying something.

You get such a tour in many, perhaps most of Poe’s tales. Most of Doyle’s Holmes stories don’t reach that height (or depth). This one does, however. I’ll stop there without revealing any of the plot of “The Adventures of the Speckled Band.” This is one journey you should make while as unprepared as Helen Stoner, the damsel in distress in this otherwise genre-surpassing story.

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