The crime is a murder; set it the mansion belonging Dr. Grimesby Roylott in Stoke Moran. Dr. Roylott was in great debt and rented out most of his property to gypsies. He was a very lonely, bitter, miserable man.
The murder is described by the victims sister, Helen Stoner, she saw her sister just before she died and experienced some of the strange things that happened to her sister on the night of her death, afraid and worried she turned to Holmes for his help.
There are many suspects in this story, such as the gypsies, or the animals that the doctor kept in the grounds. But the prime suspect in this scenario was the doctor himself, he had the motive, if his daughters should marry then the money from their mother’s will, would go to them. Therefore if they were to die before they got married the doctor would keep the money.
It is an unusual murder because the room in which it took place was locked, with the windows closed and metal bars put there. On visiting the scene Holmes finds some peculiar abnormalities with the room, there is a bell- pull, which isn’t fixed to a bell, just the ceiling. Also the bed is nailed to the floor and there is an air vent between this room and the doctors. Holmes also looked in the doctor’s room and found a bowl of milk on top of a safe also a small dog lead hung on the corner of the bed and tied to make a loop of whipcord. Holmes finds these clues using the art of the reasoner and his imaginative thinking, to work out how the previous murder happened and when the next was about to happen.
Holmes also uses the art of the reasoner in another short story- Silver blaze, where the prize racing horse is stolen and its owner beaten to death in King’s Pyland, Holmes works out that it can’t have been anyone other than John Straker or his wife, as no-one else could have made it so that curried mutton was the dinner for the stable boys, so as to hide the taste of the sleeping drug put in it. So that Straker could take the horse out of the stable at night, in order to harm the horse and fix the race.
The murder weapon was an Indian snake; the doctor kept it in a safe, but whenever one of his daughters was to be married, he would let it out. It would make its way through the air vent; down the dummy bell- pull and onto the bed to kill whatever was lying bellow it. It was then called back with a whistle, to the doctor’s room and put back in the safe.
The red herring in this story could be the cheetah and the baboon, as they could have come into the house and killed the girl, also the gypsies as there were some around at the time of the murder, and the before the victim died she said “the speckled band” which could have meant the spotted scarves they are often found wearing and a band of gypsies.
The tension is built up when Holmes and Watson stay in Helen Stoner’s room to find out what killed her sister and could possibly kill her. As they sit in darkness listening to the night sounds outside, waiting for what they don’t know at this stage, then Holmes realises that a snake has just entered the room and scares it off with a light.
The twist in the tale is right at the end, when, because the snake is scared back through the ventilator, it gets confused and bites Dr. Roylott. So his greedy and malicious plan backfires, and he is killed.
I chose to write about this story because I think that it has a lot of good points to describe, and it is a great, gripping story.
