How does Conan Doyle sustain the interest of the reader
Throughout “the Adventure of the
Speckled Band”?
In the story “the Adventure of the Speckled Band” a girl dies mysteriously. No one knows how she died, and her sister, fearing for her own life, goes to see Sherlock Holmes. She tells him all about the mysterious death of her sister and he goes to her home, with his assistant Dr Watson, to investigate. They stay in the room that the girl was in when she died and discover that there’s an air-vent that runs from the stepfather’s bedroom to the girls’ bedroom. The bed is bolted to the floor so it can’t be moved away from the wall and there’s a bell-pull by the bed that isn’t connected, its fake. In the end they discover that the stepfather wasn’t happy about the girl getting married because he didn’t want her husband to get her money so he killed her using an Indian Swamp Adder “the Speckled Band”. As the sister of the dead girl was getting married, the stepfather moved her into her sisters’ bedroom, next to his, and tried to kill her before she married. The relationship between the stepfather and the two women was not the best of father-daughter relationships. They hated him and he didn’t exactly like them because they’d inherit his money when he died. The mystery was solved and his plan backfired, the snake bit him and killed him instantly, before he had a chance to kill the daughter.