Scholars consider that the events of the story took place on 4 April 1883. 'The Speckled Band' comes from the earliest volume of collected short stories, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which was published in 1892. The stories, which were written for Strand Magazine, were carefully structured to appeal to an increasingly enthusiastic public, and they developed a predictable formula upon which individual adventures worked variations. In 'The Speckled Band' the scenes are instantly familiar to anyone who knows the Sherlock Holmes canon, but they are also superbly evocative to anyone coming to the stories fresh.

Holmes's famous ingenuity of observation is secondary, however, to the postures struck in the various set scenes in each story. The slightly overinflated and unsteady magniloquence of Doyle's prose counterpoints the restraint and precision of Holmes himself. They are incipient 'ripping yarns,' Victorian-Edwardian melodrama, but Holmes himself maintains the authority of the calculus and the elemental table, the abstract mathematical exactness of algebra and logarithms. The power of imminent suggestion does attach to the Sherlock Holmes stories. 'The Speckled Band' reminded me of India. It was its author's personal choice, coming at the top of a list of 12 as 'the grim snake story,' 'an echo of which' Doyle said could be found 'in all parts of the world.' As if to confirm this, one of the characters in Paul Scott's Raj Quartet (1975) remembers that it was her favorite as a child: 'I used to read it by torchlight under the bedclothes at the school Sarah and I went to at home. Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories are perennially popular, and 'The Speckled Band' is among the best.

The speckled band short story